How do you know your digital marketing is working?
We help clients get the best out of their digital marketing. This means we use professional monitoring tools to measure the performance of their digital marketing.
So what do you need to measure in order for you to succeed?
Here are the measures we look at and why. Some of these you can measure yourself through free tools like Google Analytics and some you do really need the use of professional software.
So what does this have to do with your digital marketing and driving sales?
When we work with a client, we ask a number of questions to find out if their existing digital marketing is working properly. This can be to support the person responsible in the business as they are generally coordinators and may lack technical depth or to ensure external agencies who are delivering the service are doing the job that they have been paid to do:
- Is your web site really organised so that it can be found on Google?
- Do you know which of what you have written is of interest to your potential visitors? Does it attract the right visitors to your web site?
- Is web site free of errors so that Google will show you higher up on the results
- Overall what does Google think of your web site?
- How long do your visitors stay on your web site, do they find it useful, and does it meet their needs?
- How often do you share information on Social media?
- Which social media channel works best for you?
- Which of your posts gives you the highest engagement and reach?
- If you use Google or Facebook advertising which advert / boosted post brings you the right visitors?
The next section will look at the pressures that we think will answer these questions for you.
Website Key Performance Indicators
Domain Authority (DA): This is an overall measure in Moz (the monitoring software we use) as to how well you are doing in Google.
Keyword Phrase Ranking: A good measure of how well you are getting found in Google (SEO) is to know how many of your chosen keyword phrases are appearing on the first page of Google. Using the software we can also tell which keywords are being searched for most.
Crawl issues: Moz, the software we use, tells us how many issues Google would experience when it crawls your web site for information.
Website Traffic: There are a number of ways to measure the number of visitors to your website. They can be, visitors, sessions, page views. To be honest it doesn’t really matter what you measure so long as you do it consistently and evaluate the trends.
Bounce Rate: Bounce rate is where somebody lands on one of your pages and then goes directly off to another web site or back to Google. It is subjective but generally anything below 50% is good and anything above 75% needs further attention. For example, if your Google Adwords campaign is driving traffic to your site but if we see nearly 100% bounce rate (which we have) then you have a problem as you are paying for the wrong type of traffic to your web site and you are wasting your money.
Competitors Analysis: You need to have an understanding of what your competitors are doing. This is essential if you are to know whether you are ahead of the pack or playing catch-up and if playing catch-up, how much work you have to do.
Website Backup: Does your web site back itself up so that in the event of a cyber-attack you can quickly restore it?
Updates: Does your web site automatically update itself so that you are running the latest version, again to protect yourself from cyber-attacks?
SEO/Readability: We encourage companies to install the Yoast SEO plugin to their web sites so that you know that each page is correctly formatted and has a good reading score so that it will perform well in the search engines.
Social Media Key Performance Indicators
With so many social media channels it is hard to keep on top of performance.
So using a software system called SumAll we look at the following:
Number of posts/tweets: Number of posts or tweets that you have posted. If you are using an agency you need to know if they are actually sending out updates, tweets or posts. (Confusingly, each social media platform using different terms to describe the same thing.)
Reach: Number of users who potentially saw your posts, tweets, retweets, replies or mentions.
Engagement: Number of favourites, shares, retweets, comments, replies and mentions you received.
Number of followers/Page Likes: Number of additional page likes (FB), followers you received.
Top Posts: What worked and what didn’t. This really important if you want to know where to concentrate your efforts.
Free Analysis for Eligible Companies
In order to get more data on how more companies are managing their digital marketing, we are currently offering a free trial of our digital marketing monitoring service for 6 weeks to those companies who need digital marketing to succeed.
Why 6 weeks? It takes a week for our systems to collect the data. However, we only really get meaningful data after a month. With setup etc. this is about 6 weeks.
We use automated software to collect the data on the performance of your web site and social media.
So what do we mean by eligible?
For some businesses, even in today’s digital world, digital marketing isn’t important to them. We are looking to help businesses where success in digital marketing is fundamental to helping them drive growth in their businesses. There is some work in setting up the evaluation and so we only want to offer the trial if we can make a difference.
The trial lasts until we can get a full month’s worth of data to evaluate. We will send you weekly updates
You will need to supply the following:
- View access to your Google Analytics. (We will send you a Google email address.)
- View access to your Google Adwords account, if you have one. (We will send you a Google email address.)
- Login details of your WordPress site (You will normally access it through www.yourdomainname.co.uk/admin or www.yourdomainname.co.uk/wp-admin )
- You will need to make us an Admin or Manager of your company Facebook page
- You will need to make us an Admin or Manager of your company LinkedIn page
- Login details for Twitter
- Login details for Instagram
We can help you find this information.
With setup complete, during the trial you will receive weekly reports and the final report will be for the month.
If you like the service and want to continue then there is a charge of £95/month payable by direct debit. There is no obligation to continue. The idea is get an idea of what is working and what isn’t with your digital marketing. If you are using an agency then our independent service will help to ensure you are getting a good service. If you have an employee doing your digital marketing this will help to identify any additional training or where you need to bring in external expertise. This is not a failing by the employee, digital marketing is rapidly becoming more complex and more creative and so you will need to cherry pick what external expertise you do bring in.
