Monitor Performance — Digital Marketing Plan

To evaluate the effectiveness of your digital marketing strategy and tactics, it is important to regularly monitor and review your performance. This will help you to identify opportunities, threats, strengths, and weaknesses.

At the onset, you should identify your key business issues and set imperatives, along with objectives and targets, to address these issues. Success hinges on how effectively you channel your resources to accomplish your objectives.

The following steps can guide you in monitoring and reviewing your digital marketing efforts:

1. Outline business imperatives and issues.
2. Establish digital marketing objectives.
3. Set targets and Specify the key performance indicators (KPIs).
4. Evaluate performance by regularly tracking and analysing KPIs.
5. Prepare and execute improvement plans.
6. Revise KPI targets as required and continue to monitor and refine your strategy.

Performance Metrics

Web analytics tools and metrics used for monitoring performance are covered in Section Metrics of Chapter Web Analytics. The section outlines a list of metrics that are useful for assessing a website’s health and performance. The key metrics relating to acquisition, engagement and conversion are as follows:

• Unique Visitors: The number of users who visit the site over the reporting period.
• New Visitors: The number of first-ever unique visitors (Assumes cookies have not been deleted).
• Repeat Visitors: The number of unique visitors who visit the site more than once during reporting period.
• Conversions: Number of visitors who complete a target action such as purchasing something, subscribing to newsletter etc.
• Conversion Rate: Proportion of visitors who perform a target action.
• Bounce Rate: Proportion of visitors who leave the site without visiting any page other than their landing page.
• Abandonment Rate: Proportion of visitors who start but do not complete a target action.
• Cost per Conversion (CPCon): Cost of ad campaign divided by the total number of conversions resulting from the campaign. (Inbound URL from ad is tagged).

Depending on your business imperatives and initiatives, certain metrics may hold greater significance. For example, if your primary objective is to generate website traffic, it is important to monitor metrics such as unique visitors, new visitors, repeat visitors, and bounce rate. On the other hand, if your focus is on lead generation through gated offers, you should track metrics such as conversions, conversion rate, and cost per conversion. It is essential to identify the most relevant metrics for your specific objectives and regularly monitor and analyse them to optimize your digital marketing strategy and improve performance.

Website Grading Tools

There are a variety of tools available for grading websites, including some popular ones mentioned in Section Website Grading Tool in Chapter Search Engine Optimization. Since these tools vary in their focus areas, it is recommended to use a combination of grading tools along with Google Analytics for a comprehensive evaluation.

However, it is important to note that while these tools provide useful information, they also have limitations. They are based on rational analysis and cannot account for emotions or feelings, and they may not fully capture qualitative aspects such as originality. Therefore, it is important to balance the results from these tools with human judgment and expertise.

Your marketing team’s knowledge and expertise are vital when assessing and creating improvement plans for your digital marketing efforts. When knowledge gaps exist, you should consider relying on quantitative and qualitative research methods outlined in Volume I and II. For instance, to test advertising effectiveness, use copy testing and advertising tracking research methods covered in Chapter Advertising Analytics in Volume II. It is important to continually improve and refine your digital marketing strategy based on data-driven insights from research and analysis.