21 Key Digital Marketing KPIs & Metrics to Track in 2024

Numerous digital marketers depend on marketing KPIs to make more informed decisions and evaluate their marketing data. Find out which digital marketing KPIs agencies benefit from the most, the best ways to track them, and why these benchmarks are important.

What is a digital marketing KPI?

A digital marketing KPI is a measurable value that a marketing team or agency uses to track and measure the success of their digital marketing strategy goals. These KPIs focus on a goal or objective like increasing revenue, website traffic, and outline activities to achieve it.

Key performance indicators tell account-based marketing agencies and other types of agencies how their clients’ businesses are doing and how their effective marketing initiatives benefit the company’s bottom line.

Why do digital marketing KPIs matter?

By setting KPIs, marketing agencies can ensure they achieve their goals. The same KPIs can also give insight into whether or not a strategy is effective. If the strategy is ineffective, the same KPIs can guide you in the direction and show you why it is not working and what needs optimizing.

When marketing agencies set KPIs for each phase of their digital marketing campaigns and measure them regularly, they’ll be able to see what’s working and adjust their approach.

Specific KPIs allow marketers to see different things. Some will provide insights into how you’re driving new conversions and website overall performance, some into how your engagements with the clients’ audiences are going, and some - how well you generate website traffic.

The two best ways to track KPIs

If you want to track marketing KPIs effectively, there are more ways than just using Google Analytics. Here are some of the most popular choices.

1. Manually by adding data from different reports

For decades, manual reporting was the only way marketing agencies could generate reports on their performance metrics.

However, it has so many drawbacks that it is no longer the best way to analyze data.

It takes a long time.

Creating advertising reports from scratch takes many hours. Because you must cover all of these marketing channels and campaigns, entering data and results from each will take up valuable time.

It is prone to human mistakes.

As you can assume, typing numbers for hours requires complete concentration. As a result, there is a high risk of data inaccuracies, as well as misplaced and mishandled data. This can be a huge error for channels such as PPC.

It requires more manpower.

Because creating reports takes a long time, some marketing agencies and departments may require additional personnel.

Tracking KPIs from a marketing template

We at Whatagraph are well aware that manually creating reports is inefficient. That is why we provide a gallery of over 95 ready-to-use templates.

Use pre-made templates to save hours of data reporting time for your marketing performance. There are currently over 40 integrations available for connecting to Whatagraph's marketing reporting software.

Locate your marketing report template and sort by integration or report type.

Access client data quickly and easily to create digital marketing KPIs dashboards or reports. Include key digital marketing metrics and KPIs, and manage multiple clients with ease.

The end result? You can create KPI reports in minutes instead of hours at a time with Whatagraph.

Top 21 marketing KPIs sorted by channel to track in 2024

For your convenience, we sorted these marketing KPIs according to their respective channels. Depending on the marketing mix you use in your campaigns, you might use a handful or all of these metrics to track your success.

Overall marketing KPIs for larger business goals

1. Customer lifetime value

Omniconvert defines CLV as ‘Customer Lifetime Value is defined as the forecast of net profit generated over the course of a business relationship with paying customers. Instead of referring to the value brought by their first purchase, CLV indicates how valuable a customer is to your business for an indefinite period of time.’

2. Customer acquisition cost

The acquisition cost is the money required to acquire a new customer. Examples of this are marketing, sales pitches or meetings, and anything else that contributes to your prospecting and conversion process. For individual items, this metric is also called the cost per acquisition or CPA. Your ultimate goal is to acquire a high number of customers at the lowest possible cost.

3. Cost per lead

The Cost per lead metric determines how cost-effective your marketing strategies are at creating new leads. A lead is a person who has shown interest in your product or service by accomplishing an objective. If you get a good number of leads at a low cost - that’s the result every agency and sales team is aiming for.

Kent Lewis, a Chief Marketing Officer at Anvil, asks these questions when figuring out their cost per lead:

‘How much are we spending to generate qualified leads? Which channels are most effective?’

4. Return on investment

Marketing ROI is a method of calculating the return on investment from a company's marketing budget. Simply put, it’s the overall value that you get out of a marketing activity compared to the money you invested in it.

For most marketing teams, this is the metric that their performance will be judged on. This KPI shows your client how well you’re doing with your lead conversion and lead generation efforts and how well you’re managing your marketing spend.

5. Conversion rate

The conversion rate indicates whether or not a user completed the action you desired. It is typically measured in percentages, with a higher percentage indicating a successful campaign. Anything can be a conversion: someone subscribing to your email list, adding an item to their shopping cart on an e-commerce website, booking a demo - any action that is relevant to your business.

Tyson Downs, the owner of Titan Web Agency, provides tips for increasing conversion rate:

‘Good website design and layout are very important for conversion rates: these factors can affect the length of time people spend on your site as well as the quality of their experience. Conversion rates also depend on the offer and call to action you provide, with a clear message being key’.

SEO marketing KPIs

6. Organic traffic

Organic traffic is generated when a user clicks on a link to your website or lands on any of your landing pages from an unpaid source. Usually, organic traffic is considered everything that comes from search engines such as Google. Essentially, this metric shows you the inbound website visitors that come from organic search sources.

7. New and lost backlinks

A new backlink means another website has included a link connecting to your client’s website.

A lost backlink implies that the link was removed from the other website, for various possible reasons. This metric is a good way to gauge your SEO efforts as well as your brand awareness.

8. Keyword rankings

In SEO, keyword rankings refer to the position of your page on the search results page for a specific keyword search. The better your page ranks for a certain keyword, the more people will click on your website, the more traffic you get and hopefully, your conversions improve too.

9. Domain rating

Domain rating (DR) is an important metric introduced by Ahrefs. On a scale from 1-100, they tell you how authoritative or “strong” your website is. While this isn’t the ultimate metric for the quality of your website, it does let you track progress in terms of your website’s search performance and overall content marketing efforts.

10. Average position

This is the average position of your content and web pages in search engine results. The lower this number, the better you’re doing with your search engine optimization efforts.

Email marketing KPIs

11. Open rate

The open rate is the percentage of email recipients who open an email. A low open rate means that you need to work on your subject lines and create more targeted emails for a better audience.

12. Deliverability rate

The email deliverability rate (or acceptance rate) is the success rate of a marketing agency specialist in delivering an email to a client's customer email address. This metric is vital for measuring the success of marketing efforts. Among marketing email deliverability best practices, there are building the right reputation and email infrastructure as well as creating relevant content.

13. Click to open rate (CTOR)

Click to open rate or CTOR compares the number of unique opens and unique clicks. In other words, it calculates how many unique clicks you got from the total number of opened emails.

For example, if 100 people opened your email and 10% clicked a link in it, this gives you a click to open rate of 10%.

Ideally, you want your CTOR to be as high as possible as it shows that your content is engaging and relevant

14. List growth rate

The list growth rate is the rate at which your email list expands. The higher, the better.

Because the goal is to gain more subscribers, every digital marketing agency should track this email marketing KPI. If you don't track your list, how will you know if it's growing or shrinking?

If you use a tool such as MailChimp, you can connect it with Whatagraph via a no code connector to get data on your list growth rate. You should aim for a rate of 2.5 percent on average.

15. Unsubscribe rate

The unsubscribe rate is the percentage of email recipients who immediately unsubscribed from your send list after opening an email. The lower, the better.

Paid marketing KPIs

16. Cost per click (CPC)

CPC is the average cost to you for each ad click. It’s one of the most important metrics for all PPC campaigns, whether on Google Ads or some other platform.

17. Click-through rate (CTR)

The CTR indicates how many times your ad or CTA was clicked on. It is typically measured in percentages and indicates how many people are likely to click on your ad/link after seeing it.

18. Return on ad spend (ROAS)

ROAS indicates how much money your advertising campaign generates. In other words, what kind of return you or your clients get from the money spent on your ads.

Social media marketing KPIs

19. Follower growth rate

The follower growth rate indicates how quickly your client's social media account is gaining followers compared to your previous follower count.

20. New comments, likes, shares, and follows

This KPI measures and tracks user engagements on clients’ social media accounts and identifies how many new comments, likes, shares and followers they get.

21. Conversions from social media

Conversions from social media refer to the accomplished desired actions made by the target audience on the client’s social media. As mentioned above, there are different types of conversion actions, so choose wisely social media KPIs.

How to choose which metrics to track?

No KPI is a ‘one-size-fits-all’ metric. However, the metrics mentioned above are the most commonly used ones that provide the deepest and best insights into your marketing strategies performance.

To deduce which metrics to track for your marketing goals, marketing agencies should consider their main KPIs that best examine their initiatives.

Whatever KPIs are most important for you to track, they must meet the SMART criteria. The KPIs you should monitor are:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Achievable
• Relevant
• Timely

In other words, each KPI you choose:

• Must provide a particular outcome that digital marketers can assess;
• Must be examined when a specific goal is accomplished;
• Must be relevant to your goals;
• Must be assigned a deadline or timeframe.

Start tracking your digital marketing KPIs today

KPI reporting may be essential to operate marketing strategies. Choosing the proper metrics to track your progress is critical when launching a new ad, SEO or email campaign. The KPIs presented in this blog are the most widely used. If you want to learn more about marketing KPIs, we created the ultimate guide to KPI tracking.

If you want to track your marketing KPIs in an easy and modern way, you'll need a dependable marketing reporting tool (for yourself or your clients). Try Whatagraph for free today!