Wondering what the best digital marketing measurement tools are? We’ve put together a list of popular tools that B2B companies and agencies use below.
Are you a digital marketer in charge of B2B marketing, executing your company’s digital marketing plan, or producing regular marketing reports to make future marketing decisions, such as whether or not the marketing budget needs to be adjusted?
Whatever the scenario, you need to measure and track digital marketing performance. After all, you wouldn’t want all your content marketing efforts to go to waste simply because you’re struggling to measure content marketing ROI, right?
Why are Marketing KPIs Important?
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are measurements that help you track and monitor digital marketing campaigns’ performance (or lack thereof). Before making any changes or improvements to your current digital marketing strategy, you must understand these key metrics.
If you don’t set goals for your marketing activities, it’s hard to tell if they’re working. Set marketing KPIs to measure whether your marketing efforts have been successful.
Any serious marketing department will have clear marketing KPIs as part of their digital marketing plan. Plus a regular frequency for digital marketing performance evaluation. They’ll provide regular marketing reports to their team to turn insights into action.
Marketing KPIs you should be measuring
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Let’s talk about some key marketing KPIs that companies should track if marketing teams want to measure the success of their digital marketing efforts.
We mention these as the most important because they tie directly to your business goals and how effectively your marketing attracts paying customers.
Sales metrics: Sales metrics are a straightforward KPI because they directly reflect your company’s growth. You must identify which financial performance metrics make the most sense to track in your company’s situation.
Some common sales metrics for software companies include monthly recurring revenue (MRR) or annual recurring revenue (ARR).
For other types of businesses, you may focus on revenue and profit as your key metrics. Profit is a better metric because it’s a more accurate reflection of your company’s current financial situation.
Quality and quantity of Leads: A lead is a person interested in your product or services. When it comes to online marketing, a lead can be tracked when they fill out a form, start a free trial, or provide contact information in exchange for a piece of content.
You have more sales opportunities as you acquire additional leads. The chance of sales growth increases with each new sales prospect.
Quality of lead is important because you want to focus on selling to people who are a good fit for your product. The quantity is also important as you need a certain number of leads to hit your sales targets.
Customer Lifetime Value (LTV): The lifetime value of a customer is the amount you may profit from them over time. You need to be aware of all sales your typical client makes during the course of their business relationship with you.
Content marketing ROI: The return on investment (ROI) of your content marketing efforts needs to be tracked as it’s a key metric for determining the success of your content marketing strategy. There are several ways to calculate content marketing ROI, but one simple method is to take the number of leads generated from your content and divide it by the amount you spent on creating and promoting it.
Related: 7 Marketing KPIs Actually Worth Tracking
Other helpful marketing KPIs
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Website Traffic: The total number of visitors that come to your website. You track this KPI to see if your marketing efforts drive people to your website. If you’re not getting enough website traffic, that’s an indication that you need to rethink your marketing strategy. Your website traffic can come through various sources, including organic search, paid search, social media, email marketing, and referral traffic.
Organic search traffic: This KPI measures how much organic traffic you get from people who find your website through search engines, such as Google. If you’re not ranking high in search results, you’re missing out on potential website visitors.
Email subscribers: This KPI measures how many people have subscribed to your email list due to each digital marketing campaign. The more email subscribers you have, the more people you can reach with your marketing messages.
Website traffic to lead ratio: Your website’s traffic must be monitored to see if people are converting into leads and potential customers.
Sales team average response time: Leads from customers deteriorate in quality as they grow older, so salespeople should respond promptly to them.
Social media reach and engagement: One method to determine whether you’re reaching your target audience is to watch your social media channels. In particular pay attention to social media growth and social media engagement rates. A ward of warning though – be careful with these as they can often be vanity metrics.
Email marketing performance: Email marketing strategy is vital to any business as it’s a great way to nurture leads and convert them into customers. You should measure your email marketing performance by looking at email open rates, click-through rates, and unsubscribe rates. Most email marketing services can provide this data, and the tools listed below integrate with many popular email software tools.
Paid advertising performance: If you’re running paid ads, you need to track how well they’re performing. Look at your click-through, conversion, and cost per lead to see if your paid advertising is paying off. These are essential digital marketing metrics to track for paid advertising.
Number of high-quality backlinks: Backlinks are essential for SEO because they help Google rank your page higher in search results.
Conversion rate: The conversion rate is the number of people who take the desired action divided by the total number of people who see your call to action. For example, if you have a website with 100 visitors and 2 people buy something from your online store, your conversion rate would be 2%. You can track conversion rates for lead magnets, landing pages, and ecommerce stores.
Related: Copywriting Software: 13 Tools for Writing Better and Faster Content
Why Monitoring Marketing KPIs is Critical to your Digital Marketing Success
If you want to succeed with your digital marketing campaigns, you need to track the right metrics.
You may track your digital marketing KPIs, get verifiable campaign results, make more informed judgments, improve your chances of success, and increase your ROI by using the most up-to-date technology.
Without regular monitoring of your marketing KPIs, you’d have no way of knowing how well your marketing efforts are actually paying off. You could potentially waste your time, effort, and money without keeping track of your marketing KPIs.
Where does Google Analytics fit in?
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Is Google Analytics enough for measuring your digital marketing activity? That depends on what you want to track. Google Analytics covers a lot of ground, but other digital marketing measurement tools can complement GA and provide more insights.
Most businesses that are in a growth or scale phase typically need to track the performance of items like:
- Blog posts and case studies
- Guest post strategy
- Website traffic
- Website bounce rate
- Content conversion
- Inbound marketing efforts and inbound links
- Search engine optimization and keyword rankings
- Search rankings
- Social media posts, social engagement rate, social campaigns, and growth of social channels
- Email marketing campaigns
- Landing page experiments
- Customer relationships
- Content engagement
- Video content
- Whatever other methods you deploy to get the attention of customers and generate sales of your product or service.
Now to do this, Google Analytics alone may fall short. Companies often need an arsenal of marketing tools to do an adequate job.
Categories and features of Marketing Measurement Tools
There are several different digital marketing solutions to choose from. As marketing trends evolve, so do the tools for measuring success.
It might be challenging to evaluate and test several tools to discover the one that works best for your budget and goals. Not to mention how time-consuming it can be!
Typically, digital marketing platforms fall under the following categories and have a mix of common features:
- Digital marketing analytics dashboard
- Reporting functions
- Google Analytics integration
- Email marketing tools
- Social media marketing tools
- Analytics tools
- Customer relationship management
- Keyword research tool
- Audience demographics or audience insights
So what are these marketing measurement tools, and how can a digital marketing manager or content marketer use them to measure digital marketing performance? You’re about to find out.
Now, does an all-in-one solution exist? A few come close, but it’s hard to find one tool that covers all the bases while also being affordable.
The great news is that we’ve compiled a list below of the most popular digital marketing tools businesses are using today to save you time and effort working it out on your own.
Measure Your Marketing Efforts With These 10 Tools
Let’s look at ten digital marketing tools that quickly and efficiently measure the effectiveness of your digital marketing strategies and performance.
Cyfe
What is it? Cyfe makes monitoring the fine details of your business or website a breeze, and makes all the relevant details of your website available to you, on one screen.
Benefits – Cyfe, in addition to monitoring relevant statistics of your digital enterprise, also acts as a project manager by tracking sales, traffic, consumer trends, and much more.
Who’s it for? Cyfe is a great tool for marketing or social media managers. It can also be used by website hosts to monitor their site’s data and marketing performance measurement.
Pricing – Cyfe makes a free, limited access version available to everyone. The premium version isn’t expensive, either, at only $19 a month.
Klipfolio
What is it? Klipfolio is an analytics tool that makes measuring digital marketing a breeze. In the form of a customizable dashboard, you’ll get an easy-to-read but detailed view of data critical to your website’s or digital business’ performance.
Benefits – Klipfolio, first and foremost, presents your site’s data in a readable format. Secondly, it combines data from a variety of sources, such as social media platforms like Moz and Twitter.
Who’s it for? We’d say Klipfolio is an application for growing enterprises and small businesses.
Pricing – Klipfolio is priced at various stages. Its lowest-priced package is $19 a month or $17 a month annually. Its most prestigious package costs $199 a month or $179 a month annually.
Raventools
What is it? Raventools takes the hassle out of SEO; it’s an all-in-one SEO proofreader, capable of finding the roadblocks in your website’s or digital agency’s traffic.
Benefits – On top of utilizing and combining valuable analytics information from platforms such as Moz and Google AdWords, Raventools is especially well known for their prolific link building tool.
Who’s it for? Professionals/individuals/agencies looking to enhance the SEO of their site or sites.
Pricing – Raventools offers a free trial, after which it costs money to use. Its first tier of product costs $99 a month, and its second tier of product costs $249 a month.
Geckoboard
What is it? Geckoboard is a tool that’s used to measure digital marketing performance of your team. Geckoboard displays your team’s KPI and measures it in a quantifiable, visible manner.
Benefits – Geckoboard helps your team keep its priorities in line, and helps you, as a project manager, keep your team on track.
Who’s it for? Geckoboard is for project managers or digital marketing managers.
Pricing – It’s priced at $25/month for the starter package, $149/month for the growth package, and $599/month for the company package.
Mixpanel
What is it? Mixpanel provides analytics of your product as well as the trends of customers viewing or purchasing your product or service.
Benefits – Mixpanel can help you or your company better understand your customers through the means of product analytics, funnels, and unique insights.
Who’s it for? Mixpanel is for product managers.
Pricing – Mixpanel features a free version, a “Startup” version that’s $99/month, and a business version that’s $999/year.
Moz Pro
What is it? Moz Pro is an SEO and content performance tool
that measures metrics that are critical to your site’s traffic, readability, and success.Moz Pro also provides its users with insight into these metrics.
Benefits – Moz Pro allows its users to streamline SEO without having to multitask; you’ll stay on top of the elements of your site that often contribute to its success or failure.
Who’s it for? Moz Pro is for SEO, Digital Marketing, or Project Managers.
Pricing – Moz Pro is priced at $99 a month for its standard package, $149 a month for its medium package, $249 a month for its large package, and $599 a month for its premium package.
Kissmetrics
What is it? Kissmetrics helps you, as a digital market, get more customers by measuring the effectiveness of your product or service’s marketing channels, engagement metrics, and much more.
Benefits – Kissmetrics provides easy-to-use, valuable, and straightforward metrics and insights for digital marketers.
Who’s it for? Organizations of any size, whether you’re a startup or a large corporation.
Pricing – Kissmetrics costs $500 a month for its “Growth” package and $850 a month for its “Power” package.
SEMrush
What is it? SEMrush is a comprehensive dashboard that makes monitoring the important metrics that make your website stand out a breeze. Check out some sample SEMrush dashboards to get a picture here!
Benefits – Streamlined SEO data has never been easier to understand, analyze, and use to your website’s or business’ advantage.
Who’s it for? SEMrush is for business owners and SEO specialists.
Pricing – SEMrush is priced by their “Pro”, “Guru”, and “Business” packages which are priced at $99, $199, and $399 respectively.
HotJar
What is it? Simply put, HotJar is a click tracker for your website, a tracker that monitors the frequency of clicks on various pages of your website. HotJar visually represents click frequency by using heat maps.
Benefits – By mapping the click frequency of your site, you’ll have potent insight into what areas of your site you need to re-think. You’ll be able to have a firsthand look at areas that might not be so user-friendly!
Who’s it for? HotJar is for site managers and digital marketers alike; it’s a unique tool that suits the needs of a versatile mix of individuals!
Pricing – HotJar quantifies its payment plans by pageviews/day. A metric of 20,000 pageviews a day will cost $89 a month, whereas the highest amount, 800,000, costs $989 a month.
Megalytic
What is it? Megalytic simplifies analytics reports, while making them more insightful.
Benefits – Megalytic can eliminate redundant elements of digital analytics reports, making the elements that truly matter stand out to you and your company.
Who’s it for? Megalytic is for digital agencies, marketers, and business owners in need of campaign measurement tools.
Pricing – Megalytic is available in four price tiers: Basic ($39.99/month), Standard ($99.99/month), Premium ($199.99/month), and Enterprise ($399.98/month).
So, which of these digital marketing measurement tools is suitable for you?
Getting a jump on your online competitors is easy with the help of any one of the tools above.
But bear in mind that the solution you select is ultimately controlled by your company’s objectives and budget.
For agencies with larger budgets to invest in software, there are pricier, more-sophisticated tools available. You can glimpse some of these here!
Here are some tips to help your marketing team to arrive at a decision:
1. Get clear on what you’re measuring
While these tools are useful, you’ll first need to work out which metrics you want to measure.
2. Hire a marketing expert
Having a marketing manager or chief marketing officer on the team to help work this out and then set up the tool, review, and make sense of all the data is even more beneficial!
If you don’t have such a person on your team, we’d highly suggest hiring someone who has these skills, as there are multiple benefits for adding a virtual CMO to your marketing team!
Another option is to hire a marketing consultant to help you get clear on what you should measure and then set up the tools and review the data with you.
3. Consider your budget
As we noted earlier in this article, some of these tools can be expensive. If you’re working with a tight budget, don’t despair!
There are plenty of free and low-cost options available that can still provide valuable insights into your digital marketing campaigns.
4. Get started!
The most important thing is to get started measuring something, anything!
You can always refine your process and tools as you go along, but the key is to get data-driven insights into what’s working and what’s not in your digital marketing campaigns.
With these insights, you can make adjustments on the fly and continue to improve the results of your campaigns over time!
Use this as an opportunity to learn more about what’s important to measure in digital marketing, and how you can use data to improve your results.
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Have you got any experience using any of these tools, or is there a tool that you feel is missing from this list? Let us know in the comments below. I’m sure our readers will appreciate it.
2 Responses
Good info on paid tools.
Thanks, Mukesh. Are you using any of these tools?