The internet is a very dynamic place and internet marketing is no different. The tricks that used to work brilliantly, such as keeping keyword density at a certain level in an article (or even flooding the article with keywords altogether) no longer produce the same result. The audience now treats websites differently; search engine crawlers are changing too.
As the strategies change, it is actually unfair to use older metrics and key performance indexes or KPIs to measure modern internet marketing campaigns. A lot of professionals are already changing the way they look at campaign results. It is time to get rid of older internet marketing metrics and replace them with new ones.
Exposure vs. Engagement
Until very recently, exposure is a metric used to measure the success of an internet marketing campaign. There is nothing wrong with using exposure as one of the key metrics, but using it on its own is definitely not the way to go.
Exposure doesn’t even tell you half the story. It simply states that a viewer accessed your site. The time that viewer spent on the site, whether that viewer interacts (or even reads) with yourcontent and other details are not represented by this metric.
Engagement, on the other hand, is far more valuable today. Engagement can be in the form of re-sharing the content, leaving a comment, or following up on a call to action displayed on the page. This is the metric you need to focus on in today’s market, especially if you are serious about monitoring the effectiveness of your internet marketing campaign.
Conversion vs. Optimization
Another metric that needs a second look is conversion rate. Sure, you want the traffic you funnel to your site to convert into customers. Unfortunately – as stated at the beginning of the article – internet users are no longer interacting with websites that way.
The viewers that visit your site to read content are not always the same as the viewers that come to your site looking for information about the product. The latter are already halfway through their purchase decision-making process, which means you can get a much higher conversion from this group.
Instead of focusing on the generic conversion rate alone, you can produce better results by optimizing your site for the different groups of audience. You can even choose to hire a conversion rate optimization agency to really drill down on the details.
ROI vs. Retention
One last common metric used by many internet marketers is ROI or Return on Investment. Thanks to its measurable nature, it is easy to keep track of the return produced by internet marketing campaigns. Today, however, with the rise of content marketing, video marketing, and social media, ROI is becoming less and less relevant.
Your audience should be considered an asset. Those viewers may not be buying products or services, but they are consuming your content. This means there is another opportunity in content monetization just waiting to be explored.
Many businesses are starting to view this new paradigm as the way forward. The site is attracting two groups of potential customers, making retaining both of them equally important, albeit for different purposes.
The older metrics are still used in today’s internet marketing campaigns. Some experts are even sticking with them until today. That said, you will get a better picture of how your business is doing online by updating to the newer, more relevant metrics we discussed in this article.
