| What to measure | What and why? | Which metrics |
|---|---|---|
| Size of audience reached | Your reach, impressions or visits. Tells you if your activities are reaching an adequately sized audience. If reach is consistently very small, it’s very difficult to get any real return or results from your digital activity. | Facebook, Instagram - Reach |
| LinkedIn, Twitter - Impressions | ||
| Website - visits, users | ||
| Engagements | Likes, shares, comments and interactions on digital content are engagements. | |
| Tells you if the audience you’re reaching is interested in what you have to say. Very low engagement rate suggests your content isn’t interesting or relevant to your audience. | Engagements | |
| Calculate the engagement rate by dividing Engagements by Reach | ||
| Email - open rate, click rate | ||
| Results | Actual results and conversions - bookings, donations, sales, registrations of interest. When your digital communication contains a call to action, how many people take the action. This tells you if your digital activities are achieving your business goals. | Requires setting up conversion tracking on Google Analytics, then measuring conversion events |
A small audience can frequently be appropriate - such as audiences with very niche interests, or a small but high value audience of corporate fundraising prospects on LinkedIn. Audience size does not always need to be large. When it’s a small or niche audience, engagement is an even more important metric, as it demonstrates the relevance of the audience. You should also measure the change in engagement over time - ideally your audience should become more engaged, the longer the relationship continues.
Our recommendation is to use the top-level metrics, based on the audience - engagement - results framework, for reports to funders and other senior stakeholders. This framework will give them a clear and concise overview of how each channel is performing.
The more detailed metrics can be used as needed in monthly / quarterly internal reports, in order to identify issues and opportunities for the digital staff.
Be cautious about using benchmarks as performance targets. Benchmarks by their nature include a large range of organisations - including organisations much bigger or smaller than you, from very different causes. They also often include organisations who are doing very minimal or outdated digital activities, and this skews the numbers downwards. Benchmarks are frequently dragged downwards by very mediocre performances.
The best benchmarking you can do is against yourself. Measure your performance on each digital channel on a regular basis and look for ways to improve the results.
If you’re starting out with a channel, do some Googling of benchmarks for the various metrics to give yourself a sense of where you are. Just remember to use them as a rough guide only, and not for setting targets. These sources should also be helpful: