Launching a digital marketing campaign isn’t just about sending emails or running ads—it’s about aligning your strategy with measurable results that directly drive sales. The success of your efforts comes down to tracking key performance indicators (KPIs). But the real question is, which KPIs to track in your digital marketing campaigns to truly measure their effectiveness and guide smarter decisions?
Whether you’re leveraging email marketing, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, or search engine optimization (SEO), knowing which numbers matter most can make the difference between wasted spend and real growth. At NEXTFLY, an Indianapolis digital marketing agency, we help businesses set up campaigns with the right tracking in place, ensuring every click, conversion, and dollar spent works toward your bottom line.
What Are KPIs?
KPIs, or Key Performance Indicators, are the measurable metrics that reveal how well your digital marketing campaigns are performing. They serve as benchmarks that tie your efforts back to your business goals, helping you understand if your strategies are paying off.
To effectively track KPIs, businesses rely on tools like Google Analytics 4 (GA4) and Google Ads, which provide insights into website activity, campaign performance, and customer behavior. There are ways to calculate these measurements, but it’s much easier with the proper tools in place. GA4 can provide calculations of conversions, but without the proper tracking tools collecting the right data, the numbers GA4 provides are more of a guess. Without the right KPIs in place, it’s nearly impossible to optimize your campaigns for consistent success.
KPIs to Track in Your Digital Marketing Campaigns
There are countless metrics you can monitor, but the real question is which KPIs to track in your digital marketing campaigns? The answer depends on your overall strategy. When SEO, PPC, and email marketing work together, they can drive powerful results, but only if you set the right goals from the start. To help you measure success more effectively, here are some of the most important KPIs to track for a clear picture of your campaign’s performance.
Keyword Rankings
Keyword rankings show where your website or ads appear in search results, making them one of the most important KPIs to track in your digital marketing campaigns. For SEO, monitoring keyword rankings helps you understand how well your content is performing organically. Higher rankings typically mean greater visibility, increased traffic, and more opportunities to capture leads without paying for clicks. By tracking shifts in rankings, you can spot trends, identify content gaps, and refine your on-page and off-page SEO strategies to maintain or improve your position.
For PPC, keyword rankings play a slightly different role. Paid ads are triggered by specific keyword bids, and tracking their placement helps you gauge how competitive your ads are in search auctions. If your ad ranks higher, it usually translates into more impressions and clicks, but it can also impact your cost-per-click (CPC). Optimizing your keyword strategy in PPC ensures that you’re bidding on terms that are not only driving visibility but also delivering conversions at a sustainable cost.
By tracking keyword rankings across both SEO and PPC, you can align your strategies to maximize visibility, control costs, and target the terms most likely to generate sales.
Impressions
Impressions measure how many times your ad, email, or piece of content is displayed to users. While impressions don’t directly equate to engagement, they indicate reach and help you assess how visible your brand is across different platforms. So, although impressions won’t bring you customers now, they are important to create that top-of-funnel awareness for your digital marketing campaign. There’s a chance that with enough persistence, a viewer might search for your product later or visit your website without clicking any ads because you left quite the impression.
Clicks
Clicks represent the number of times someone engages with your ad, email, or search result, and they’re one of the most straightforward KPIs to track in your digital marketing campaigns. A high number of clicks often indicates that your message, creative, or subject line is resonating with your audience and motivating them to take the next step. On the other hand, a low click count may suggest that your targeting, design, or call-to-action needs refinement.
By analyzing click data, you can uncover valuable insights into what content your audience finds most engaging, which channels are performing best, and how user behavior shifts across different campaigns. For example, if an email campaign generates a high open rate but low clicks, you may need to improve your call-to-action or adjust your offer. Similarly, if a PPC ad drives clicks but not conversions, it may signal a disconnect between the ad copy and the landing page.
Tracking clicks not only shows immediate engagement but also helps you shape your broader strategy. Over time, you can test different headlines, creatives, and targeting options to maximize click performance and ensure your marketing dollars are driving meaningful interactions that support your overall goals.
Click-Through Rate (CTR)
CTR measures the percentage of users who click after seeing your content. To calculate CTR, divide the number of clicks by the number of impressions and multiply by 100. For example, if your ad had 1,000 impressions and 50 clicks, your CTR is 5%.
A high CTR shows that your content is resonating, and this metric is vital not only in PPC campaigns but also in email marketing, where subject lines and calls-to-action heavily influence performance.
Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)
Return on Ad Spend, or ROAS, measures how much revenue you earn for every dollar spent on advertising. To calculate it, divide the total revenue from your campaign by the total ad spend. For example, a ROAS of 4 means that for every $1 invested, you generated $4 in return. When evaluating which KPIs to track in your digital marketing campaigns, ROAS is often the one that decision-makers value most because it clearly answers the question: How much did we spend to make one sale?
ROAS goes beyond simply showing profit—it reveals the overall efficiency of your advertising strategy. A strong ROAS indicates that your campaigns are not only generating sales but also doing so in a cost-effective way. On the other hand, a weak ROAS signals that your targeting, messaging, or bidding strategy needs adjustment.
Maximizing ROAS requires a combination of tactics: refining audience targeting to reach people most likely to convert, improving ad creative to increase engagement, and optimizing landing pages so that clicks are more likely to lead to sales. It also involves ongoing testing—comparing different ad formats, channels, and campaign strategies to find the highest-performing combinations.
Ultimately, ROAS provides a clear, bottom-line metric that ties your marketing efforts directly to revenue, making it one of the most critical benchmarks for proving the value of your digital marketing campaigns.
Cost Per Click (CPC)
CPC tells you how much you’re paying each time someone clicks your ad. To calculate it, divide the total ad spend by the number of clicks received. A lower CPC indicates that your campaign is cost-efficient and that your targeting, bidding strategy, and ad relevance are aligned with your audience’s needs.
Conversions
A conversion occurs when a user completes a desired action, such as making a purchase, filling out a form, downloading a resource, or signing up for a newsletter. Conversions are the ultimate goal of most digital marketing campaigns because they represent tangible results tied directly to your business objectives. Unlike impressions or clicks, conversions show whether your campaigns are actually driving the outcomes that generate revenue or build your customer base.
To track conversions effectively, you’ll need to configure conversion events in GA4 and set up conversion tracking in Google Ads. This allows you to see not just how much traffic your website is getting, but also which campaigns, ads, or keywords are leading to real business results. For example, GA4 can track actions like button clicks, form submissions, or completed checkouts, while Google Ads can connect those actions back to the ads and keywords that influenced them.
Ultimately, conversions are one of the most important KPIs to track in your digital marketing campaigns, as they tie every marketing effort back to measurable business growth. By properly setting up and monitoring conversion tracking, you gain a clear understanding of what’s driving results—and where to focus your resources to scale success.
Are You Using the Right Tools to Track Your KPIs?
Tracking KPIs is only effective if your tools are set up correctly. Platforms like GA4 and Google Ads need proper configuration to capture data that aligns with your goals. As campaigns evolve, your KPIs to track in your digital marketing campaigns should also be reviewed and adjusted. If you fall short of your goals, you may need to adjust your KPIs to better meet expectations. However, if you blow through your KPIs, you may see that they need to be scaled up.
The more data you collect through GA4, tags, and events, the clearer the picture becomes. With accurate tracking in place, you can make data-driven decisions that refine your digital marketing strategy and boost performance.
NEXTFLY® Can Help You with the KPIs to Track in Your Digital Marketing Campaigns
At NEXTFLY, we don’t just run campaigns, we build strategies rooted in measurable success. Our team ensures your KPIs are properly tracked, analyzed, and optimized across email, SEO, and PPC campaigns. Whether you need help setting up GA4, refining your ad spend, or understanding what the numbers really mean, we’re here to guide you. With NEXTFLY by your side, you’ll have the clarity and insights needed to turn data into results.