Understanding the ROI of Your Digital Marketing Channels

Businesses have access to more marketing data than ever before. It’s easy to get caught up in the numbers — comparing every data point at face value — instead of focusing in on the associated cost for the key performance indicators (KPIs) critical to your business’s digital marketing success.

Looking Beyond Conversion Rates and Lead Quality

Website-based tracking analytics can tell you how many users visited your website from any marketing channel, how many users performed your chosen conversion action, and the percentage of those users who converted. 

Lead quality measures the value of the leads generated by dividing the number of qualified lead actions (like calls, forms, or chats) by the total number of actions they perform on your website (like viewing a specific product or service page). Higher quality leads are more likely to convert and complete a sale, so the higher the lead quality for any channel, the higher the likelihood your business has to generate revenue. 

Trusting conversion rates and lead quality alone can be misleading as they don’t provide the full story of how your marketing investment translates to sales success. Not all of your marketing channels need to achieve the same performance metrics to be valuable channels for your goals because the labor and money you spend are unlikely to be uniform across channels. 

You should always be looking to apply ad spend and other investments to your conversion rates to understand the associated cost to drive your target users and generate your desired conversions.

For example, if your paid channels have a low lead quality compared to your other traffic channels, it doesn’t automatically mean that your advertising efforts aren’t working for your business. Advertising campaign types like display have a lower lead quality because the ads are being served to a larger audience of mid-funnel users. You may not be converting a large percentage of those users, but display campaigns are incredibly affordable when you look at how much money you actually spent per qualified lead.

Likewise, channels that don’t require ad spend to attract traffic to your website need other forms of investment to make them a success. Traffic attributed to your email marketing efforts not only requires time and labor investments to write, layout, proofread, and send, but you’re also paying for email marketing and CRM platforms, stock images to make the email pop, and possibly contact lists for your target audiences.  

Understand Your Competitive Position

When you can clearly see what channels generate high-quality leads and demonstrate a strong return on investment for your business, you can make better decisions that drive more leads. Sign up for a free digital analysis to gain insights into what is or isn’t working and a market-specific plan for action — no strings attached.