Top 15 Most Important KPIs for a Digital Marketing Agency: Track Your Success in 2022

Digital marketing is an industry that’s worth billions of dollars worldwide. It’s one that is going to become even more important during the COVID-19 pandemic too, as face-to-face business becomes more difficult. If you’re turning to digital marketing during these uncertain times, you need to have key performance indicators that let you gauge your success.

Which marketing KPIs are worth your time and which don’t show you key information? What is the most important marketing agency KPIs? It can be tricky to figure out the right KPIs to use to figure out if your campaign is working or not.

We’re here to help you. We know what you need to be on the lookout for and the tools you should be using. We know the critical measures of success that can prove whether your campaign is working or not.

Ready to find out which marketing KPIs you need to track? Then keep reading!

Top 15 Most Important KPIs for a Digital Marketing Agency: Track Your Success in 2022

1. Bottom Line Profitability Percentage

When you are contracted by a customer, they need to see an increase in their profits. Modern technology gives digital marketers more and more tools to get the job done, so if they aren’t seeing an increase, something is going badly wrong. 

To work out your bottom line profitability percentage, you need two figures to hand: revenue and net income, which is your client’s profits after they’ve paid all their fees and running costs. Divide their net income by their net revenue and multiply that by 100 to get the profitability percentage.

2. Lead Sources

You should find out where your sales are coming from. This is one of the most important marketing KPIs for the long-term life of your business. 

If all of your leads come from one source, a disruption, such as your server going down or a store closing, could damage your business. Create a chart that shows sales by lead source as percentages of total sales. Diversifying your lead sources now could help protect your company in the future.

3. Time Invested In Project Vs. Returns

This is one of the most crucial marketing KPIs to keep an eye on to see if your marketing efforts are worth the trouble. Keep track of the time that you’ve been working on marketing and pitch it against any increased profit that you’ve seen since you began the campaign.

With this data, you can work out the profit generated per hour of marketing work. If you’re making less money than you normally would, you need to take a hard look at your current marketing strategies.

4. Cost per Acquisition

How much is each new customer gained costing your client in terms of their marketing budget? Are you helping your client make a profit? That’s what the cost per acquisition KPI can show you.

To work out your cost per acquisition, you need to take the total amount you’ve spent to acquire new customers via a specific channel and divide it by the number of new customers. The resulting figure will show you how much it’s costing your client to acquire each new customer.

5. The Average Cost per Lead

In addition to working out the cost per acquisition, you should also find out how much each lead is costing your client. If you aren’t converting these leads, there could be an issue with the sales strategy rather than your marketing strategy. The average cost per lead varies from industry to industry, so it is worth finding out the average cost in your client’s sector, too.

To work out the cost per lead, take the amount of money you’ve spent on a campaign and divide it by the number of leads generated. 

6. Lead Conversion

How strong are your marketing and sales teams at converting leads into actual sales? If you’ve got plenty of leads but few are becoming paying customers, there could be an issue with how you attempt to close the sale.

Take the number of leads that have converted to sales and divide it by the total number of leads. Multiplying this number by 100 will give you your lead conversion percentage.

7. Social Media Engagement

Perhaps the most important of social media marketing KPIs, are people engaging with the content that you post? Do you need to learn how to create more engaging content? 

Learning to measure social media engagement is easy. Follow these steps to figure out how your strategy is going down on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or other social media:

• Pin down a period that you want to make a report on
• Find how many likes, shares, and comments you have and add these together
• Divide this number by the total number of followers
• Multiply by 100

This gives you the total percentage of your followers that are engaging with your content. The higher it is, the better you’re doing.

8. Lifetime Customer Value

A customer shouldn’t just buy one product or service and then disappear. That’s what the lifetime customer value KPI is all about, and it’s a crucial KPI if you market a subscription service.

To uncover lifetime customer value, find out your churn rate, that is, how many people cancel their subscription each month as a percentage of total subscribers. You can use this data to discover the average customer lifetime using the formula of 1 divided by the percentage monthly churn rate. If you have a 2% monthly churn rate, your average customer will do business with you for 50 months, for instance.

You should also find out the gross profit that you make from each customer after you’ve paid to provide the service. When you have this data, the formula is simple:

• Take your monthly gross margin per customer
• Multiply it by (1 divided by monthly churn rate)
• Multiply this number by the average monthly revenue per customer

John Lincoln from Ignite Visibility explains more in his video below:

9. Goal Completions 

Setting goals is a crucial part of the business. Your goals should be SMART, which means specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time bound. You need to be achieving these goals.

Keep track of the goals that you want to complete by a certain time and see if you’re hitting them. If you aren’t, is there an issue with your criteria or an issue with your marketing strategy?

10. Traffic-to-Lead Ratio

Are you making the most of your web traffic? Take the total number of visitors that your website has and the number of leads that you generate from your website and generate a ratio.

For instance, if you get 1000 visits to your website a month and generate 100 new leads, you have a 10:1 traffic to lead ratio and a 10 percent conversion rate. 

11. Email Click-Through Rate

Are your customers engaging with the promotional and marketing emails that you send out? To work this out, take the number of clicks generated from a marketing email and divide it by the total number of emails sent, then multiply this by 100. 

As an example, say you have 1000 clicks and sent out 10000 emails, you would have a clickthrough percentage of 10 percent.

12. Inbound Link Building

The more inbound links that are driving traffic to your site from other websites, the better. You can use several different SEO tools to find out how many inbound links to your site there are on the web and you should be actively increasing this number.

One way to do this is by crafting high-quality guest posts for other blogs that direct users back to your site. Whatever method you take, it’s important to try and build more inbound links, as this is one of the criteria Google uses to rank your site in search results.

13. Response Rate

Do customers respond to your communication efforts or do your messages go ignored? To find out your customer response rate, take the number of customers responding and divide it by the number of customers contacted. Then multiply this number by 100.

14. Bounce Rate

How many customers come to your website and leave straight away without navigating to any other pages on your site? Is there something putting customers off your site?

To calculate your bounce rate, divide the number of total visitors to the site by those that only visit one page. Then multiply it by 100. 

15. Email Signup Rate

How many people who visit your customer’s site want to sign up for your emails? Do most people want to stay in touch or are they not interested?

To find out, you should take the total number of visitors to the site over a certain period and see how many new subscribers to your newsletter you had. Divide the number of new subscribers by total visitors and multiply it by 100 to get your email signup percentage.

Want to Boost Your Marketing KPIs?

If you’d like to improve the performance of your campaigns, you need to be tracking these KPIs across your various different efforts.

If you’d like to learn more about digital marketing, check out the Digital Marketing section of our Blog! Do you have any questions for us? Please don’t hesitate to get in touch! Also, read about What Are the Most Important KPIs for your agency article as further reading.