Why Digital Benchmarks Matter in Marketing

It’s natural to want to compare yourself not only against your compeitiors but also your past performance. This will help you understand the baseline of your company’s success. As well as, where you need to improve relative to that data. For this reason, it’s completely natural that you want to know how your digital marketing campaigns are performing.

That is where digital benchmarking comes into play, it’s a way of discovering how to achieve the best performance.

What is Digital Benchmarking?

Digital benchmarks can be measured by the historical data of your company, by a competitor or by an entirely different industry. You can use this information to identify gaps in an organization’s processes in order to achieve a competitive advantage.

In general, digital benchmarks are metrics that you can use to gage your company’s performance. When it comes to digital benchmarking there are different types of performance metrics to look at. This is important to determine how your digital campaign is doing in regard to the goals you have set. Plus, how you measure against those set goals from past performance.

Typical digital benchmarks for your campaigns can include:

• Site Visits
• Time on Site
• Bounce Rate
• Cost-Per-Click (CPC)
• Click-Through-Rate (CTR)
• Cost-Per-Acquisition (CPA)
• Conversion Rates
• Blog Performance 

How to Use Digital Benchmarks in Reporting

Using digital benchmarks in reporting is especially important. Comparing your brand to your past performance can identify gaps, opportunities, underperforming campaigns and campaigns that are competitive.

When you compare yourself to historical industry benchmarks you may find a few things:

1. If your current max bid is $1.50 and you’re not driving any clicks/impression and you do industry research and find the industry average is $3.00 than the first thing to change is to increase your max bid closer to what your competitors are most likely bidding.
2. You may look at a campaign and assume that you have a low clickthrough rate of 2.3%, however when you check, you may find the industry average at 1.9% – congratulations you are more successful than you thought! 
3. If you notice a drop in traffic and aren’t sure why one thing to do is to look back at your performance from a year ago. There might be seasonality in your industry or a new competitor in your space. By looking at your previous benchmarks you can determine if the change is to be expected or something to take more seriously.  

Understanding and tracking digital benchmarks is crucial for being able to assess campaign performance and assessing campaign performance is critical component for reporting to stakeholders in your business. 

Key Takeaways 

Overall, digital benchmarks help set delivery expectations and provide a powerful indicator of relative campaign performance. However, it is important to remember that ‘normal’ can vary based on a number of factors. Make sure to check in on items like campaign objectives, size of target, and placements. Understand where you are, where you’re going and where you need to be.

Our team of digital strategists make sure your brand’s offerings are at the right place at the right time. To capture your potential customers in the digital space schedule a free consultation with BrandCraft here.