Marketing ROI: Top Metrics You Need to Know to Measure Success

How much gain do you really get from your marketing efforts? Is it worth the game, or are your expenditures laid over the benefits? The answer to these questions might be hard to find, though in most cases, it is the return on marketing investment or ROI.

What is ROI in business? And how do you calculate it to measure the effectiveness of your marketing efforts, particularly? – Let’s answer these questions!

What Is ROI?

ROI means just what you can guess from its name – it’s the ratio between a specific investment you make and the net income you receive.

Now, what’s the purpose of ROI tracking? First and foremost, it’s there to evaluate the efficiency of specific investments your company makes to understand how necessary they are for your business. The higher it is, the more favorable your investment is regarding gains, which perfectly justifies it.

However, when it comes to some expenses that can’t be cut down completely, such as marketing, evaluating ROI can help establish baselines, find weak spots in your strategy, and strengthen it to receive greater results.

Marketing mix modeling can play a crucial role here by providing data-driven insights into which marketing channels and tactics yield the highest ROI, enabling businesses to allocate resources more effectively.

How to Measure ROI: 7 Metrics You Need to Keep Top of Mind

1. Organic Traffic

   Organic website traffic is that traffic (visitors who land on your site) that flows to you naturally via search engines. The most efficient way to gain it is by ensuring high positions in search engine result pages (SERPs) by optimizing your site and content for search engines because the biggest share of total web traffic is focused in the first three positions in results.

   If this metric of your site is low, you’re not getting the most out of your strategy and might need to optimize for search engines better. You can use tools like AI Overview Tracker for this purpose. This tool is there to help you understand, monitor, and optimize your content better for search results to drive more traffic.

   Now, how does this metric affect your marketing? Unlike paid traffic, which requires additional investment, organic traffic is earned for free. That is, it can provide you with a higher ROI and boost the overall profitability of your advertising efforts. On top of that, the growth of organic traffic can help you establish better brand visibility and awareness, grow trust, and receive even greater outcomes in the long run.

2. Keyword Rankings

   This metric stands for the positions you take in SERPs for specific keywords. And it’s one of the most crucial additional metrics to keep an eye on to increase your organic traffic because the higher you rank, the more visitors can come to your site.

   If you notice low rankings while tracking your digital marketing ROI, you might either select the wrong keywords or fail to optimize your site properly. In the first case, you need to re-think your target queries and ensure they are relevant, high-volume, low-competition, and match user intents. In the second case, try integrating more SEO best practices into your efforts, including:

   • Thorough keyword optimization;
   • Relevant content creation;
   • Optimization of page titles and descriptions;
   • Image optimization;
   • Internal linking;
   • URLs optimization;
   • Technical optimization (page speed time, mobile friendliness, etc.)
   • Link-building.

3. Bounce Rate and Dwell Time

   Organic traffic, albeit important, doesn’t guarantee the profitability of your marketing efforts because it’s not enough to bring prospects to your site. You also need to make them wanna stay.

   That’s when tracking bounce rate and dwell time can help you see the big picture. Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who leave your site immediately after checking out just a single page. Dwell time is the amount of time visitors spend on the page they land from SERPs until the time they navigate away from that page.

   Together, these two metrics can give you a clear understanding of the engagement and effectiveness of your content. If dwell time is low and the bounce rate is high, this might indicate the need to rethink your copy to make it resonate with your audience more and deliver more excellent value.

4. Conversion Rate

   Conversion rate stands for the amount of visitors who take your target action after landing on your site. The action could be anything from subscribing to your newsletter to purchasing your product or service. One way or another, conversion is one of the primary goals (and performance indicators) of your efforts.

   A low conversion rate can mean several things. If you’re wondering how to improve marketing campaign based on it, here are a few things to try:

   • Better align your content to customer journeys to ensure they find the right pages;
   • Prioritize intent-driven keywords;
   • Optimize your landing pages to have more impact;
   • Incorporate clear calls-to-action (CTAs).

   

5. Backlink Growth

   Backlinks – the links to your site and content received from other web sources – can act as votes of trust, growing your authority in the eyes of your audience and search engines, which is especially crucial in the age when users want to buy only reputable goods (especially online). They can significantly enhance your keyword rankings and the traffic flow to your site.

   In order to ensure that your ROI marketing is high enough, you should continuously monitor the amount and quality of your backlinks. Additionally, you may want to check your domain authority to see how trusted your site appears.

6. Cost Per Lead (CPL)

   Another thing you need to keep in mind for efficient ROI tracking is the cost per lead. CPL means just that – the price your business has to pay to generate new leads that your sales team can later convert. The lower the cost per lead, the greater the return you can gain for the money you invest.

   To boost your overall marketing ROI, you might want to focus on driving more leads from organic search, in particular. This will give you a significantly lower CPL, hence increasing your gain.

7. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

   CAC is a metric that allows you to calculate the cost of acquiring a customer. Since a customer is someone who actually makes a purchase and, thus, drives your revenue, this metric might be one of the most pivotal ones for assessing the success of your advertising strategy. For an excellent ROI, you want to keep your CAC low – meaning it shouldn’t cost your company too much to acquire a new client.

   To measure SEO success, you may want to calculate your CAC from organic search.

The Role of SEO in Your Company’s Revenue and Growth

As you can see, while exploring the top metrics for assessing ROI marketing, we placed a special focus on organic search and SEO.

Why’s that?
The truth is that most conventional efforts, such as paid ads in search engines or social media, can cost your business quite a lot of money. Search engine optimization, on the contrary, is one of the most powerful yet cost-effective means of promotion that exists today. SEO can help you drive more prospects, leads, and customers without investing much money. In the long run, this can help you improve your overall digital marketing ROI by reducing the cost and maximizing the gain. Hence, SEO ROI is one of those things businesses should keep at the forefront of their minds these days.

Conclusion

Regardless of your business size or niche, marketing is your path to growth and prosperity. When handled effectively, it can help you boost brand awareness, capture leads, and make more sales with fewer efforts. But how do you understand if your efforts pay off in full or not so much?

Return on investment is one of the key ways to measure success. Use the metrics we shared with you here to measure SEO and marketing return on investment and ensure that you make the most out of your efforts!