Author: Franz Malten Buemann

Google Chrome browser extensions allow you to increase productivity, reduce distractions, and source content — all in the comfort of your internet browser.
The best part is that you have plenty of options. The Google Chrome web store offers a variety of different tools that help you become safer, smarter, and more productive with just one click. We’ve curated the best ones here.

We can’t guarantee that these extensions will make puppy YouTube videos less tempting to watch, but we recommend them for busy marketers who want to make their time online more efficient. We’ve broken them down into different categories if you want to jump ahead:

Productivity
Security
Social Media
SEO
New Tab
Content Sourcing
Blogging

Please note: All of these are free tools, but some of the services that they work with may have paid features or subscriptions.

For all of the greatness that the internet affords — cute animal videos, GIFs, and interesting blogs — one of its biggest downsides is how distracting it can be. How many times have you sat down to work and been pulled into a pit of procrastination?
Perhaps you get absorbed in updates on social media, or maybe you click through Wikipedia trying to determine what exactly Gina Rodriguez’s first TV role was (it was on Law & Order). No matter where you click online, it’s easy to be pulled into a black hole of distraction and low productivity.
Check out the extensions below to remedy this problem and be your most productive self.
1. HubSpot Sales

Users: 800K+
HubSpot’s Sales tool connects your email inbox with your CRM. Instead of having to navigate back and forth between the two products, this extension allows you to transfer contact information from your email directly into your CRM. This saves employees time in their day-to-day workflow and retains valuable information about customers.
Another cool feature that HubSpot Sales provides is the tracking and logging of emails. Users can send emails and receive alerts when their message is delivered, opened, and clicked on. The email thread can then be logged continuously into the CRM throughout the entire correspondence.
2. Todoist

Image Source
Users: 700K+
Todoist is a project management tool that lets you create highly organized and visually appealing to-do lists across all of your devices. What’s neat about the Chrome extension is that you can see your to-do list, or your team’s shared lists, and add tasks to it without having to open a separate tab, app, or device.
3. Reply

Users: 10K+
Reply’s Chrome extension helps you research and engage with your potential prospects on LinkedIn. This is a fast and easy way to find and verify anyone’s email address — both one by one or in bulk using LinkedIn Sales Navigator.
Once you get the contacts, you can sync them to your CRM — including HubSpot — or connect with the prospects right away.
4. StayFocusd

Users: 600K+
StayFocusd lets you budget your time on specific websites so you can eliminate distractions when you need to buckle down and work. It’s highly customizable — you could set your time limit to 20 minutes on Twitter and only five minutes on Facebook, for example. It also has neat features like the Require Challenge: Once you set time limits on sites, if you want to go back and change your settings, you have to complete a challenge (think: retyping a piece of text without typos or answering questions).
5. LastPass

Users: 10M+
LastPass is a password manager that autofills in passwords for all of the accounts you save with this extension. You only have to remember one password: your LastPass password. This saves you time and headaches and increases the security of your personal data.
6. Add to Trello

Users: 10K+
If you use Trello for project management, team collaboration, your content calendar, or just a personal to-do list, this extension lets you easily add links as cards to your Trello boards.
7. Extensions Manager

Users: 100K+
We couldn’t give you 50+ different extensions to try out without also suggesting Extensions Manager. Try this tool to organize all of your extensions so they don’t take up half of your browser’s screen. It shows you what extensions you have operating on Google Chrome and gives you the option to hide some of the icons to keep your browser better organized.
8. Toggl Track

Users: 300K+
If you often find yourself spending too much time on one task — to the point that you no longer have time to complete other tasks — consider using the Toggl Track Chrome extension. It initiates a timer right within the comfort of the browser. There’s no need to start a timer on your phone. Simply open up the extension and begin tracking the time you spend on tasks.
9. Print Friendly & PDF

Users: 700K+
If you ever need to save a page in a print-friendly format or as a PDF, you can easily do so with the Print Friendly & PDF Chrome extension. The extension removes ads and other cluttering elements from the web page to turn it into a pleasant reading experience. You can also delete images and change the text size.
10. Email Finder

Users: 200K+

Whether you’re carrying out sales outreach, seeking guest blogging opportunities, or looking for the owner of a small website, Email Finder will automatically give you a list of verified emails associated with that domain. It’s an absolutely brilliant tool for sales reps and marketers who want to save time when looking for potential contacts at a company.
1. HTTPS Everywhere

Users: 2M+
“HTTPS” is a website protocol that ensures a site is secure before you visit it. And although you might recognize this tag at the beginning of most websites, it’s not quite ubiquitous across the internet — nor does it guarantee that the site you’re browsing is 100% secure.
The Chrome extension, HTTPS Everywhere, rewrites the request you send to any website you visit in Chrome so you can be sure your browser produces the secure version of that site. Browse assured that all your personal information is kept safe and your computer doesn’t catch malware while you’re online.
2. Click&Clean

Users: 1M+
If you’re constantly searching and downloading work material during the day, it can be a tedious task to clear your browser history. You just don’t have the time to keep pulling up your history page and manually clearing your cache or download log.
The Click&Clean extension for Chrome allows you to clear your cache, URL searches, website cookies, and download history with a single click of a button on your browser toolbar. The extension can also scan your computer for viruses and clean up your hard drive of unused applications — helping your computer run faster as a result.
3. J2TEAM Security

Users: 200K+
J2TEAM Security isn’t your average firewall. This Chrome extension starts with basic virus protection. It also allows you to customize your website block list and ensures your Chrome browser uses the “HTTPS” security tag on blogging sites — preventing you from visiting user blogs that are deemed unsafe.
The extension also offers a variety of Facebook-specific privacy settings, such as blocking the “seen” tag after you read certain private messages and hiding how long you’ve been active in Facebook Messenger.
4. Ghostery

Users: 2M+
Ghostery is a sophisticated ad-blocking extension designed to remove ads that distract or interrupt you while you’re viewing specific website content. It also disguises your browsing data so ad-tracking tools are unable to collect personal information that you’d prefer to keep private. These features help to speed up webpages’ load time and ultimately improve your browsing experience.
5. Checkbot

Users: 40K+
Checkbot combines technical SEO with modern security to help you analyze both how safe and how optimized a website is for search engines. Because search engines like Google prioritize website security in addition to content quality in their rankings, this Chrome extension is a handy one-two punch for content creators and web developers.
Checkbot can test the page speed, SEO, and overall security of more than 250 URLs per domain for free — and help you improve in these three categories to protect you and your website visitors from unsafe material.
6. Avast Online Security

Users: 10M+
Avast Online Security is known as a “web reputation plugin,” examining each individual website you visit for suspicious information. The extension also warns you if the site you’re visiting simply has a bad reputation. In turn, you can rate the websites you visit to help Avast get better at flagging potentially unsafe webpages while on Chrome.
7. FlowCrypt

Users: 70K+
This security extension is specific to emails, allowing you to send and receive encrypted emails (and attachments) to and from your colleagues. It’s one of the best ways to be sure your emails are kept private and secure while in transit to the recipient.
FlowCrypt uses PGP encryption, which stands for “Pretty Good Privacy” — the standard for encryption in most email clients. The tool integrates perfectly with Gmail, adding a “Secure Compose” button to your inbox.
8. Fair AdBlocker

Users: 1M+
Fair AdBlocker offers both malware and adware in one browser extension. The tool protects you from malware as well as distracting ads and pop-ups. Once installed, you can configure your blocking settings to hide the types of ads you’re least interested in seeing — especially those that carry dangerous information that can infect your computer.
9. Speedtest by Ookla

Users: 2M+
Find out how fast your internet connection is and learn how quickly websites are loading. Knowing this information can help you move to another internet connection if needed, and you’ll also get to see performance metrics for your own site.
10. Hola Free VPN

Users: 7M+
Whether you need to cloak your identity online or browse content from another country, Hola Free VPN allows you to do that for free. The tool can help you browse the internet safely and anonymously without needing to pay for an external VPN service.

Chrome Extensions for Social Media
1. Bitly

Users: 500K+
This extension lets marketers quickly and easily shorten links and share them on social media directly from their browser. This is particularly useful for social media marketers and allows for personalization with an Enterprise plan.
2. BuzzSumo

Users: 20K+
BuzzSumo provides insight into how content is performing. When you’re on a web page, click the extension to show metrics such as the number of social shares and backlinks to a piece. This tool provides an easy way to see how much engagement your content is generating. You could also use BuzzSumo to perform competitor analysis and uncover strategies that might make your content more shareable.
3. Pinterest

Users: 8M+
This extension allows you to easily save items onto your Pinterest boards without navigating away from what you’re doing. What’s neat about this tool is that it shows you multiple pinnable items available on each website so you can save more than one item to your board at a time. (Normally, you would have to click into each blog post or image in order to separately pin each to your boards individually.)
4. Save to Facebook

Users: 1M+
Facebook’s “Save” feature lets users aggregate links, images, and videos they find on Facebook in one location in their account. This extension allows you to do the same from anywhere on the web, making Facebook a centralized place to save content you’re interested in checking out later.
5. RiteTag

Users: 30K+
RiteTag shows you how hashtags are performing on Twitter and Facebook before you post content. Once you log in to RiteTag using your Twitter or Facebook credentials, it checks the hashtags you begin typing in real time and color codes them:

If your hashtag is green, it means the hashtag will help your content be seen now.
If your hashtag is blue, it means the hashtag will help your content be seen over time.
If your hashtag is gray, you should select a new hashtag because it has low levels of engagement.
If your hashtag is red, you should select a new hashtag because it’s so popular, your content will disappear into the crowd.

6. Buffer

Users: 200K+
Buffer allows you to easily share content from any website to your Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn profiles. If you’re a Buffer customer, you can also use the extension to schedule posts from your browser without needing to access the Buffer website. You can also queue posts for future publication.
7. App for Instagram

Users: 90K
Want to keep tabs on Instagram notifications without having to constantly check your phone? With this extension, users can see what’s happening on their Instagram content directly within their browser. As opposed to having to check your phone, you can access your Instagram feed right in the browser and see other Instagram user’s content in much greater detail.
8. Reddit Enhancement Suite

Users: 1M+
Do you regularly use Reddit in your personal life or in your marketing efforts? And are you specifically a fan of the old version of Reddit? Download the Reddit Enhancement Suite Chrome extension to enhance your experience on the website and browse posts much more easily than you did before. This extension is only compatible with the original version of Reddit.
9. SocialAnalyzer

Users: 800+
SocialAnalyzer is a social media monitoring tool that allows you to keep up with trending posts in one of your target markets or industries. See the most recently published posts and videos on YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook, and see whether people are interacting with the content that people are already publishing. You can use this tool to further refine your social media marketing efforts and track brand sentiment.
10. HubSpot Social

Users: 20K+
Are you a current HubSpot customer? HubSpot Social allows you to post on your social media profiles straight from your browser. You can schedule posts in advance, share a quote from an external article directly to your social feed, and share webpages, too. No need to access your HubSpot portal in another tab. Do it straight from your current webpage.

Chrome Extensions for SEO
1. SEOQuake

Users: 700K+
SEOQuake is a Chrome extension that allows SEO marketers to easily get insights about different websites without leaving their web browser. With one click, you can find search ranking and backlink information about the search results on a Google results page. It also provides details about the amount of backlinks the website has (according to SEMRush), shows you the keyword density of a page, and lists external and internal links.
2. Check My Links

Users: 200K+
Check My Links does what it says it will: It quickly scans web pages and shows you which links are working properly and which are broken. With this extension, marketers can ensure that their own websites are functioning properly for their visitors. Additionally, marketers can check for broken backlinks to their content on other websites. That way, they can build backlinks to their content and increase their domain authority.
3. NoFollow

Users: 100K+
NoFollow quickly indexes web pages and identifies links that are coded with the no-follow metatag. No-follow links aren’t crawled by search engines and don’t contribute to search engine authority, so SEOs can use this extension to determine if external sites are backlinking to them with followed, or indexed, links.
Additionally, you might use no-follow links on web pages you don’t want crawled, such as a landing page or thank you page, and this extension can easily double-check if you’ve coded links correctly. In the example screenshot below, no-follow links are highlighted in red.

4. Ahrefs SEO Toolbar

Users: 80K+
Ahrefs SEO Toolbar is an SEO tool that’s great for beginners and experts alike. Ahrefs SEO Toolbar is a Google Chrome plugin that lives in the search engine results page (SERP), so you can get SEO insights for every website and keyword, all while you Google search.
Discover thousands of the best performing keywords to target for SEO & PPC. Spy on your competitor’s Google Ads, Facebook, and Instagram ads, and find the best backlink opportunities.
5. Impactana

Users: 2K+
Impactana’s Chrome toolbar offers a wealth of SEO, social media, and content marketing information about any web page. Its two biggest metrics are “Buzz,” which measures a website’s reach on social media, and “Impact,” which measures SEO metrics such as click-through rate, backlinks, and time on page. It also shares details like author and publisher contact information that are useful for PR professionals.
6. Keyword Surfer

Users: 300K+
Keyword Surfer is just like the Arel=”noopener” target=”_blank” hrefs Chrome extension in that it gives you related keywords for your industry-related searches. You can see the monthly search volume for the keyword and generate an article outline that could potentially help you rank for the keyword. The tool also allows you to see the word count of competing pages and articles.
7. Link Research SEO Toolbar

Users: 10K+
Link Research SEO Toolbar allows you to see the core metrics of a website and understand how well it performs against the competition. The Chrome extension is best paired with an active Link Research Tools subscription to get the most out of it.
8. SEO META in 1 CLICK

Users: 200K+
SEO META in 1 CLICK is a fantastic tool for seeing a website’s meta information in — you guessed it — a single click! No need to right-click, hit “View Page Source,” and read through line after line of code to see a website’s meta description. You can use this as a competitive research tool to see what your top-ranked competitors are putting in their meta descriptions.
You can also use it to double-check that your website is optimized across the board. It even offers shortcuts to check the mobile friendliness of your website and analyze the keyword density of the page.
9. Serpstat Website SEO Checker

Users: 20K+
Analyze your competitors’ performance with the Serpstat Website SEO Checker extension. Depending on your competitors’ website security, you’ll be able to detect their CMS, sitemap status, structured data, and more. When you sign up for a Serpstat account, you can also see the page’s top keywords and traffic.
10. SEO Minion

Users: 100K+
SEO Minion allows you to carry out in-depth competitor research by giving you access to your competitor’s website metrics and data. You can also check for broken links, highlight all links, and preview how the page appears in the SERPs — all handy tools for examining your own webpages and articles and ensuring they’re in tip-top shape.

1. OneTab

Users: 2M+
When you conduct research for a piece of content, it’s easy to get swamped in multiple open tabs with great resources you want to cite. The trouble is, once it comes time to write and refer back to the sources, it’s hard to navigate between all of the tabs. Luckily, OneTab lets you put multiple different URLs into a single tab for easy reference.
2. Momentum

Users: 3M+
Momentum is a simple Chrome extension that replaces blank new tabs with beautiful photography, inspiring quotes, weather reports, and a space for you to write down a priority for the day when you open up your browser for the first time. (Don’t worry — the temperature is in Celsius, it’s not that cold in Boston.)
3. Blank New Tab Page

Users: 30K+
Blank New Tab Page is exactly what it sounds like — a completely blank, white page when you open a new tab in Chrome. Today’s browser settings and themes — and new versions of Google Chrome — display previews of recently visited websites or a Google Search bar on new tabs when you open them. If all you want is a blank page to navigate somewhere new, this Chrome extension is what you’re looking for.
4. Infinity New Tab

Users: 400K+
Infinity New Tab includes a feature known as Speed Dial on every new tab you open in Chrome. This feature produces large icon-based shortcuts to your most frequently visited websites, as shown in the screenshot above. You can customize these icons with new websites as needed, and add productivity widgets like to-do lists to each new tab as well.
5. Start.me

Users: 70K+
With Start.me, you turn each new tab you open in Chrome into a personal dashboard. You can populate this dashboard with webpage bookmarks, productivity widgets, news feeds from specific websites, and various photos and videos. If you prefer to keep your daily schedule online, rather than in print or on your desktop, you might find this extension useful.
6. Earth View

Users: 900K+
This Chrome extension might not make your browsing experience easier, but it will make it prettier. Broaden your geography skills while surfing the internet at the same time with Earth View by Google. Each time you open a new tab, the first thing you’ll see is a satellite image of a beautiful location somewhere on Earth. See some of the images that pop up on new tabs in the screenshot above.
7. Infinite New Tab

Users: 200K+
Not to be confused with “Infinity New Tab” (the fourth new tab extension on this list), this browser accessory turns your new tab into a canvas. Choose from more than 100 wallpapers to customize your new tab background, as well as a reminder list and note pad for staying on task.
8. Homey

Users: 30K+
Homey is a relaxing and uncluttered new tab Chrome extension that turns your new tab page into a dashboard. You can see your city’s weather, access your bookmarks, or create a grid with your most-frequented websites. Alternatively, you can keep the dashboard clean and mess-free for a less overwhelming experience. Like most new tab Chrome extensions, it also gives you access to the search engine of your choice.
9. New Tab Redirect

Users: 600K+
Got a website you always need to have open? This Chrome extension automatically opens a page of your choice when clicking on a new tab. The tool can even redirect to a specific file you have saved in Google Drive or elsewhere online.
10. Speed Dial

Users: 600K+
Speed Dial is a charmingly old-school Chrome extension that turns your new tab into a 3D dashboard. Access your bookmarks and more frequented sites in a dashboard that might just remind you of your MySpace days. Don’t let its design fool you: The extension is constantly updated for performance and user-friendliness.

Chrome Extensions for Content Sourcing
Sometimes you just need a good content curation tool to help you save important information while you’re researching or writing a blog post.
1. OneNote Web Clipper

Users: 1M+
Are you a OneNote user? Whether you’re conducting research for a project or simply reading different articles online, you most likely come across resources that you want to save and return to for later use.
That’s where OneNote Web Clipper comes in. Instead of saving content to another application or document, you can save it directly to your existing OneNote notebooks for easy reference when you sit down to write a blog post or web page. The best part? Everything will be available on any device where you use OneNote.
2. AwesomeScreenshot

Users: 2M+
AwesomeScreenshot is a screen capture extension with capabilities for annotation and photo editing while staying in your browser. Once you take a screenshot of a selected area of your screen or an entire web page, you can crop, highlight, draw shapes, and blur sensitive information.
3. Evernote Web Clipper

Users: 3M+
Evernote is a note-taking and organization app that can be shared across teams for content collaboration. With the Evernote Web Clipper extension, users can save links onto a clipboard within their Evernote app for later reading and reference.
4. Giphy for Chrome

Users: 300K+
Everyone loves animated GIFs. They make emails, blogs, and social media posts engaging and funny, and with this extension, you can easily grab a GIF from Giphy’s huge database for whatever content you’re working on without navigating away.
5. Sidebar

Users: 20K+
Manually bookmarking websites can sometimes be a tedious process. Sidebar allows you to organize websites you want to save without having to open a new tab. Save websites to bookmarks, create folders, and add notes for later reference.
6. Distill Web Monitor

Users: 200K+
Distill Web Monitor allows you to keep track of changes to websites or articles that you’ve cited in your own work. That way, you can ensure that you’re providing the most up-to-date information to your readers and website visitors. You can also use it to simply track pages that you’re interested in citing in the future.
7. Nimbus Screenshot

Users: 1M+
Nimbus Screenshot is another screenshotting extension that will live within your browser, making it easier than ever to capture a partial or entire page. It will automatically save your screenshots to the cloud, ensuring that you don’t lose them.
8. LibKey Nomad

Users: 200K+
For marketers and bloggers who work in technical or research-based industries, LibKey Nomad can be an extremely useful Chrome extension to have in your arsenal. The extension allows you to find, access, and source millions of scholarly articles based on the library that you primarily use.
9. Video Downloader Professional

Users: 300K+
Do you need to source non-YouTube-based videos for your blog posts? Check out Video Downloader Professional, a Chrome extension that allows you to download videos from the internet. This is particularly useful if you find a video on Twitter, Facebook, or other external website where the embed code or original video link isn’t available.
10. Google Scholar Button

Users: 2M+
Google Scholar is another tool you can use if you write content in a technical, scientific, or otherwise research-heavy industry. You can find articles and books straight from the comfort of your browser. The tool sometimes links to the article’s landing page on a research website, and sometimes it links directly to the PDF. Either way, it’s a great way to streamline research so you don’t have to manually search for books and articles online.

Chrome Extensions for Blogging
1. Grammarly

Users: 10M+
Grammarly is my go-to app for reviewing blog posts for proper spelling, grammar, and word use. You can drop large pieces of text into the desktop application for review, or you can use the handy Chrome extension to call out any grammar errors you’re making while typing on the web.
2. Google Dictionary

Users: 3M+
Have you ever come across a word you’re not familiar with while doing research online? Instead of Googling it in a separate tab, quickly highlight the word and click on the Google Dictionary extension to get the definition.
3. Office Editing for Docs, Sheets & Slides

Users: Not Published
For those times when you and your coworkers are working on computers with different operating systems, or want to collaborate on a live document together, check out Office Editing. This extension lets you easily drop Microsoft Office files into Google Drive to view and edit them without needing the software installed on your hard drive.
4. Difree

Users: 8
Sometimes it’s hard to free yourself of distractions to write productively, especially if you’re writing online. This new extension quickly opens a new tab for a clean and neutral text editor that auto-saves while you’re working if you need a break from where you normally write.
5. LanguageTool

Users: 1M+
LanguageTool is a useful Chrome extension for checking the existing text on a website and checking the grammar of your work as you write. It works in Google Docs and any website where there’s an active text box. It also works for different languages, so if you’re aiming to write for different markets and regions, you’ll most definitely want to add this tool to your arsenal.
6. Wordtune

Users: 200K+
Wordtune is an AI-powered Chrome extension that provides several alternatives to what’s currently on the page. No matter what tool you’re using — whether it’s Google Docs, Outlook, or another text editor — you can highlight the sentence or phrase you’d like to rewrite, and Wordtune will provide several alternatives. After that, you only have to choose the one you like best.
7. ProWritingAid

Users: 200K+
ProWritingAid is another smart Chrome extension for checking the grammar, spelling, and clarity of your blog posts, web pages, and articles. Like the other tools on this list, it works with Google Docs and any text editor in your browser. It will catch any errors you make as you write and suggest corrections.
8. Readme

Users: 100K+
Readme is a text-to-speech reader that works right within your Chrome browser to increase accessibility as you write or read articles. It can also help you listen to your drafts out loud for proofreading purposes. Listening to your writing can be an excellent way to catch errors.
9. Helperbird

Users: 20K+
Helperbird is an accessibility Chrome extension that can help writers with dyslexia, blindness, or other disabilities work more efficiently. You can change the font of the page, change the font sizes, use a magnifier, and turn text into speech. You can also turn pages and articles into a plain-text “Reader Mode” for easier reading and scanning.
10. MyBib

Users: 800K+
Do you list citations in your blog posts and articles? Use the MyBib Chrome extension to create citations right within the browser. Simply travel to the page, Tweet, article, or video you’d like to cite, select the format you’d like to cite it in, and then copy and paste. Alternatively, if you’re collecting various sources, save it to a “Project.” You’ll then be able to download all of your works cited in any format you prefer.
Bonus: It gives you an in-text citation, too. Absolutely brilliant.
More Chrome Extensions Equals More Productivity
Now that your browser is loaded with extensions to make marketing easier on a day-to-day basis, test them out to see what time and efficiencies you’re able to save. When you’re ready to work on your next piece of content, try all of the tools listed above to make the process less painful and time-intensive. Your team will thank you for it.
Editor’s note: This post was originally published in November 2016 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Have you ever double-tapped an image on Instagram, reacted to a video on Facebook, or clicked a search result in Google, only to realize afterward that it was actually an ad?
Maybe you never realized it was an ad at all — you just thought it was a cute picture of a dog.
More than ever, ads can be contextual, relevant, targeted, and helpful in ways they never could before. In short, ads today are content.
But the online advertising landscape is changing.
New platforms, ad types, and targeting capabilities are popping up all the time.

Let’s dig into everything you need to know about online advertising across ad platforms for social media, paid search, display, and native advertising.
If you’re only interested in learning about a certain type of online advertising, you can use the table of contents below to navigate to each section.

How to Advertise Online
93% of all online interactions start with a search engine, and with those odds, you can catch the attention of the audience you want through online advertising.

There’s plenty of ways to advertise your business strategically. Think about who you’re trying to reach when you start. Ask yourself “What target demographic am I advertising to?” and “How can I place my product or service offering in front of my target?”.
The answer is to see where your target demographic spends the most time online. Research their most frequented social media channels and most searched keywords. You can take this information and translate it to organic and paid marketing.
Not all online advertising has to cost money, people can find your business organically through social media marketing. Making a business page on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or even TikTok can capture people’s interest through engaging posts and content.
Now if you want to use pay-per-click (PPC) marketing, most social media offers business pages the ability to pay a fee to promote posts/ads within the interface. Or if you are looking to advertise on a search engine for targeted keywords, Google Ads or sixads can guide you through the process of payment and execution.
There are three key ways that digital advertising can help you improve the performance of your organic marketing efforts.
With digital ads, organic performance can benefit from:

An increase in brand awareness by displaying your content to individuals within and outside of your networks.
A better understanding of your audiences by leveraging the targeting and analytics of the ads platforms.
The creation of higher-performing content by understanding what ad content helps you achieve your business goals and what doesn’t.

The goal of any ads strategy should be to get a positive return on your investment, which comes down to whether you’re getting more revenue out of the ad campaign than the cost you’re putting in.
How can you determine what your ad spend should be to get the most return on your investment? To start answering that question, we’ll need to understand the bidding system used by the ad networks.
A bid is the maximum amount of money you’re willing to pay for the desired action on your ad. If it sounds like an auction, that’s because it is an auction. Ad networks have a limited amount of ad space, and to determine whether or not your ads are shown to your target audience, they run an auction to see how much each advertiser is willing to pay for ad space.
Just like in an auction, the highest bidder wins. Let’s say you bid $10 for a click on your ad, and the next highest bidder only pays $5 for a click.
Each ad network will only make you pay the lowest amount possible to win the bid. In this example, you might be willing to pay $10, but in reality, you’ll only have to pay $5.01 to win the bid. Winning this “auction,” in addition to the overall quality of your ads, will determine how your ads are displayed on the different ad networks.
Here’s another example of how the ad auction works from WordStream.

Image Source
At this point, you might be thinking, “Okay, I get how the auction system works. But how do I figure out how much I should actually spend to see a return on my investment?”
My advice is to work backward from your revenue to determine what your maximum bid should be.
Use this equation:
Lifetime Value (LTV) x Average Lead-to-Customer Rate x Average Conversion Rate
Your LTV is how much a customer is worth to you throughout their relationship with your business. The average lead-to-customer rate is the rate at which your leads become paying customers. And your conversion rate is the rate at which new contacts convert on your content offers by filling out a form.
Combined, these metrics show you how much you should spend on your paid ads to break even.
Let’s say that you want to use digital ads to promote your new content offer. You’re going to need to know what your maximum ad spend should be to see a positive return on your investment. Assume that you know the following about your business:

Lifetime value: $500
Average lead-to-customer rate: 10%
Average conversion rate: 20%

Plug these numbers into the equation above to determine what your maximum ad spend should be: $500 x 0.10 x 0.20 = $10. This means that you can spend a maximum of $10 per click on your ad to break even. Your goal should be to spend less than $10 to see a positive return on your investment.
Types of Online Advertising
Now that we know more about how to advertise online, let’s dive into the various types of online advertising.

Social Media Advertising
Every month, there are nearly 2.5 billion active users on Facebook, 1 billion on Instagram, and 330 million on Twitter worldwide.
Whether it’s to chat with friends, stay connected to people across the globe, or for business and networking purposes, consumers are on social media for a multitude of reasons — and marketers know it. Because of the sheer number of active users on these platforms, advertising spend invested in social media channels is at an all-time high. Social media advertising across the world is projected to exceed $8.5 billion this year.
Advertising on social media comes with many advantages. You can:

Reach very specific target audiences with the help of targeting features and different audiences across all of the social media platforms.
Leverage a variety of ad formats to advertise in a way that aligns with your business goals.
Invest in the specific advertising efforts that drive leads and sales for your business.

Let’s take a look at eight popular social media networks, including Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, Snapchat, and TikTok. We’ll cover the audiences and ad types available on each one.
1. Facebook
Facebook is the most widely used social media network. Almost 2.5 billion people around the world use Facebook. That’s more than 30% of the world’s population.
With so many people using Facebook, you’re almost guaranteed to be able to reach an audience that’s relevant to any type of business. That’s where one of the most powerful features of advertising on Facebook comes in: audience targeting. The targeting capabilities on Facebook are unmatched by any other social media network.
There are three types of audiences that you can target on Facebook:

Core audiences: An audience based on criteria like age, interests, and geography.

Custom audiences: Get back in touch with people who have previously engaged with your business.

Lookalike audiences: Reach new people whose interests are similar to those of your best customers.

Facebook’s advanced targeting can be used to target your ads to the most relevant audience — and even tap into new audiences you’d otherwise never reach with organic content alone.
Advertising on Facebook includes a range of ad types, including:

Photo ads
Video ads
Story ads
Lead ads

Photo ads are great for sharing collections of image content. Video ads are great for product explainer videos and branding. Story ads allow you to use a combination of photo and short-form video content. If you want to learn more about the different ad types, here’s a great course from HubSpot Academy all about Facebook Advertising.
Personally, my favorite way to advertise on Facebook is with lead ads because they give you the best of both worlds: sharing visual content and generating leads all at the same time. Facebook Lead Ads allow you to capture lead information without directing people out of the Facebook platform.

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No matter your business’ size or industry, you can use lead ads to find potential customers who are likely interested in your products or services. With lead ads, you provide a helpful piece of content that encourages viewers to sign up for a newsletter, receive a price estimate, or request additional business information. In return, when the viewer fills out the form, the business receives a new lead.
Another way to advertise on Facebook is through Facebook Messenger.
Facebook Messenger is a separate messaging app that comes with its own advertising opportunities. Facebook Messenger is the go-to messaging app in countries including the U.S., Canada, and Australia. Other messaging apps like WhatsApp and WeChat are the more popular choice in countries throughout South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia.

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Across the world, 20 billion messages are exchanged between people and businesses every month on Facebook Messenger. Ads play a big part in initiating conversations on Facebook Messenger.
There are a few different ways you can use Facebook Messenger as part of your advertising strategy.

Facebook Messenger call-to-action in ads: Start conversations with ads on Facebook that include a call-to-action to send a message.

Facebook Messenger Story Ads: Run story ads on Messenger Stories.

Facebook Messenger Ads: Use messenger ads to deliver content directly into users’ Facebook Messenger chats.

All of these ad types come together to encourage your audience to kick off conversations with your business. They can be used to get in contact with a sales team, request more information on a product, or even share other content like blog posts or ebooks.
My favorite way to advertise on Facebook Messenger is retargeting. Retargeting ads in Facebook Messenger are a great way to start targeted conversations and send personalized offers and content.
Sponsored messages allow you to advertise to people who have already interacted with your business in Messenger. This is a great way to re-engage your audience in a personalized way.

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2. Instagram
You can also advertise on Instagram through the Facebook Ads Manager. Instagram has over 1 billion monthly users globally. That’s a little less than half of the number of users on Facebook. The majority of users are between the ages of 18 and 34.
There are three ways that you can advertise on Instagram:

Promote posts and stories directly from your Instagram professional account.
Create ads from your Facebook Page and promote them on both Facebook and Instagram.
Create ad campaigns in the Facebook Ads Manager to access full targeting capabilities.

I recommend taking the third option and creating custom campaigns for your audience on Instagram.
Instagram has similar ad types to Facebook, including:

Photo ads
Video ads
Story ads
Ads in Explore
Shopping Post ads

By far, the most interesting ad types right now are ads in the Explore Tab and Shopping Post ads. People using Instagram Explore are exploring their interests and discovering new content creators. Ads in Instagram Explore are a great opportunity to put your brand in front of a new audience.

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Shopping Post ads allow you to include a tag that shows the product’s name and price within your image. Clicking on the tag takes your prospects directly to a product page where they can purchase the item — all without leaving the Instagram app.

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3. LinkedIn
The LinkedIn platform has over 660 million monthly active members worldwide. Users on the platform are largely made up of working professionals which makes LinkedIn a great place for B2B (business-to-business) advertising. LinkedIn is the go-to platform for working professionals, which provides B2B advertisers a large audience pool to reach.
Plus, the advantage of advertising on LinkedIn is its unique targeting capabilities. On LinkedIn, you’ll have access to unique targeting criteria that isn’t available on other platforms.
You can target users on LinkedIn by unique demographics, including job title, job function, and industry. Maybe you only want to advertise to potential customers at the director level who work in customer service within the recruiting industry. LinkedIn’s targeting capabilities make that possible.
Plus, with the option to include lead gen forms in your LinkedIn ads, LinkedIn can be a lead generation machine. This will allow you to not only reach a very specific audience but drive leads without directing them outside of the LinkedIn platform.
The most interesting ad type of LinkedIn is Message Ads. Message Ads allow you to send direct messages to your prospects to spark immediate action.

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How to use LinkedIn Message Ads:

Deliver a targeted message with a single CTA.
Drive stronger engagement and response than traditional emails.
Measure the impact of your messages.

But a word of warning: Don’t send too many Message Ads to the same people or it will come off like spam. And, make sure the messages sound authentic – if you were writing a LinkedIn message to a friend, what would you write in it?
If your Message Ads are too stiff, they’ll come off as spammy, too. Remember: This channel is a one-to-one conversation. Direct messages are sacred spaces – if you’re going to advertise there, you need to be extra careful about taking the time to make your Message Ads feel personal and relevant to your end-users. Make sure you’re delivering value to them in a way that feels authentic.
4. Twitter
Digital advertising is less common on Twitter because organic reach is still a significant driver of a brand’s performance on Twitter. This is very unique to Twitter – but even so, ads can still deliver strong results depending on what your goals are. Twitter has over 330 million monthly users globally. The majority of users are between 35–65 years old.
Advertisers have discovered a few niches that have high engagement on Twitter: B2B and e-commerce. Many B2B companies are using Twitter as a digital marketing tool, and Twitter users are known to spend a lot of money online. This makes advertising specifically to these audiences a great strategy.

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Twitter breaks down its ads into five goals:

Awareness: Promote your tweets and maximize your reach.
Tweet engagement: Promote your tweets and get more retweets, likes, and replies.
Follows: Promote your account and grow your Twitter following.
Website clicks: Promote your website and get more traffic.
App downloads: Promote your app and get more downloads.

All of these can work together to help you grow your audience on the platform and convert users into customers.
5. Pinterest
Pinterest is a unique social media platform with 300 million users who are highly engaged and predominantly female. Some people say that Pinterest is the only platform where users actually want to see ads from brands they love because Pinterest is all about visuals.
How to advertise on Pinterest in four steps:

Pick a pin: Promote your best pins so they appear in the most relevant places.
Decide who sees it: Set up targeting so the right people see your ads.
Pay for results: Choose to pay for engagement or visits to your site.
Track what’s working: Once your campaign starts, see how it’s doing and make changes.

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Pinterest is great for businesses relying on photography to sell their products and who have a female target buyer persona.
6. YouTube
YouTube is the second largest search engine, second only to Google, with over 2 billion monthly active users. Ads on YouTube appear before and during other YouTube videos or as a stand-alone promoted video that’s displayed after performing a search.
Since you can target demographic information and interests, you can serve your videos to specific relevant audiences already watching videos from similar brands or on related topics.

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7. Snapchat
Snapchat’s 218 million users are predominantly made up of people between the ages of 18–24.
Snapchat offers a few ad types, including story ads, sponsored tiles in Snapchat Discover, and augmented reality (AR) lenses.
Snapchat’s ad types feel pretty similar to the advertising options on Instagram. What really makes Snapchat unique is the augmented reality lenses. AR lenses are sponsored by a business to create interactive moments that users can use and share with their friends. It might be hard to believe, but in this example from Dominos that pizza isn’t really there — that’s the AR lens at work.

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8. Tiktok
One of the newer — and most popular — players in the social media advertising world is TikTok. TikTok is all about creating short, creative, and oftentimes funny videos. TikTok has exploded in the past few years and has reached 500 million monthly users.
Advertising options are still limited; they are mainly geared towards driving awareness. TikTok doesn’t hyperlink posts to websites and only recently started allowing advertising, so businesses advertising on TikTok focus on boosting brand awareness rather than leads or traffic.

Promoting TikTok videos allow brands to build awareness with a young target audience. Most of the posts you’ll see on TikTok are aimed at getting laughs. From a brand perspective, you’ll want to create videos that are funny and align with other content on the platform. Think of things like dance challenges and memes. This type of content is the most effective.

Paid Search Advertising
People searching online are looking for something specific and will click on the first result they believe is going to be the most helpful to them.
You might be thinking: “I already appear in organic results on search engines. Why should I pay to advertise too?”
Well, there are three key reasons:

On average, digitally prepared businesses anticipate four times better revenue compared to the less-prepared ones
Advertising on search engines protects you from the competition who may be advertising on your branded terms.
Search ads appear first in the search engine results pages (SERPs) above the organic results.

Paid search advertising allows advertisers to capture the attention of their audience in a more targeted way than with organic search alone.
Search ads allow you to anticipate the wants, needs, and desires of your potential customers and serve ads to them that are highly contextual. Over time, the analytics of your search ads can help you analyze and improve those ads to reach even more people.
But how does Google know how to deliver the right ad to the right person? That’s where keywords come into play. A keyword is one word or phrase that someone uses to describe what they need in search. Advertising on search platforms takes the targeting capabilities available on social media platforms, like demographics and location, and layers it with the addition of keywords.
When a Google user types a query into the search field, Google returns a range of results that match the searcher’s intent. Keywords align with what a searcher wants and will satisfy their query. You select keywords based on which queries you want to display your ad alongside.
Keyword research is just as important for paid ads as it is for organic search. That’s because Google matches your ad with search queries based on the keywords you selected. Each ad group you create within your campaign will target a small set of keywords and Google will display your ad based on those selections.
Let’s say Mary is moving to a different house and is looking for a home mover. So she goes into Google and types “who are the best movers.” By searching “best home movers,” she’s going to see results for advertisers that targeted keywords like “moving companies” and “top-rated movers.”

Search engines also consider your intent when choosing the types of ads to display.
In the example above, search ads were the most helpful resource. But what if you’re looking for a location-based business, like a coffee shop? In Google maps, you might see “Promoted Pins” like these, shown in purple on the map and in the search results on the left. Promoted Pins are a great way for businesses to attract customers to their business based on location.

What if you’re looking to make a purchase? Well, Google might show you a different kind of post to match your intent, such as Shopping Post Ads.
In this example below, Google shows you shopping post ads for the keyword “buy snowboard.” Since my query includes the word “buy,” Google knows that I’m interested in making a purchase, so I am shown ads for products I might be interested in.

So how do you select your keywords?
Keywords typically fall under two categories: brand and non-brand.
A brand keyword is a word or phrase that includes a brand’s name or variations of a brand’s name. For example, some of HubSpot’s brand keywords include HubSpot, HubSpot Free CRM, and HubSpot Marketing Hub. These are all variations of the HubSpot brand and the tools that we offer.

Non-brand keywords are all other relevant keywords that don’t include a brand’s name or variations of a brand’s name. Some of HubSpot’s non-brand keywords include inbound marketing, sales software, and customer relationship management.
While these keywords are not part of HubSpot’s brand name, they are relevant terms that allow HubSpot to reach audiences that might be interested in eventually making a purchase.
Brand and non-brand keywords play a role in your digital advertising strategy. Brand keywords help you protect your brand from your competitor’s ads.
If you don’t run ad campaigns for brand keywords, you’ll leave your business vulnerable to losing website traffic to the competition who is bidding on your brand keywords. Non-brand keywords still have a role to play, too. Non-brand keywords allow you to reach new audiences unfamiliar with your brand.
When it comes to when your ad is displayed, you don’t just want to pick a certain group of keywords and have the ad shown only when those keywords are entered into the search engine.
This is where match type comes in. Since there’s an infinite number of ways that people can actually search for one term, Google gives you three match types to choose from: exact match, phrase match, and broad match. You can even use a broad match modifier and exclude negative keywords to optimize where your ads are delivered.
Let’s take a look at each match type:

Exact match: A keyword set to exact match will only display your ad if the search term includes that exact keyword or a very close variation. Exact match keywords are surrounded in [brackets].

Phrase match: A keyword set to phrase match will display your ad if the search term contains the same order of the words, but it can also contain additional words. Phrase match keywords are surrounded by “quotes”.

Broad match: A keyword set to broad match displays your ad when the search term contains any or some combination or variations of the words in your keyword, in any order. Broad match keywords don’t include any symbols.

Broad match modifier: The broad match modifier allows you to select keywords that must be included in the search query for your ad to be displayed. Keywords with a broad match modifier use a +plus sign.

Negative keywords: Excludes your ads from being shown on searches with that term. Negative keywords include a -minus sign.

Google vs. Bing vs. Yahoo
There are a few advertising platforms out there for search, including Google, Bing, and Yahoo. But Google is by far the most used search engine out there. With 3.5 billion search queries a day, over 71% of the total searches made daily around the world are done on Google. Google brings in six times more searches every day than Bing and Yahoo, combined.

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But this doesn’t mean you should entirely rule out advertising on these other platforms. In some cases, you can achieve impressive results with a smaller ad spend on Bing and Yahoo than you could on Google since there is less competition from advertisers.
My recommendation is to dig into your organic traffic to identify if Bing or Yahoo make up a significant amount of traffic for any given keywords or topics. This might indicate that advertising for those keywords on Bing or Yahoo could be profitable.
Regardless of where you advertise, the good news is that advertising on all of these platforms more or less work and look the same. So knowing how to advertise on one will make advertising on the others easier.

Native Advertising
Publishers like BuzzFeed and The Dodo produce content that snowballs in popularity on social media almost every day. And they make money by helping other brands do it, too. Brands will pay these publishers to craft posts and videos that follow the publishers’ formula for virality. They also pay publishers to distribute this sponsored content to their massive audience through social media and their website.
This is native advertising.
Check out this example from Geico. It partnered with BuzzFeed to create this video advertisement for morning workouts. It’s a topic that is loosely related to insurance, which Geico sells, and it tapped into BuzzFeed’s expertise to create this video that feels right at home with the rest of the content on the site.

When you pay for a publisher’s native advertising services, you’ll be able to leverage their editorial expertise and audience reach to help your brand tell captivating stories to a bigger and better viewership. And each publisher is going to support different ad formats and creative types.
During the creative process, you’ll collaborate with publishers to craft sponsored content that covers one of their main topics and looks like a regular piece of content on the publisher’s website.
This way, even though your post is technically promotional, it won’t disrupt their audience’s browsing experience. They’ll enjoy reading your post and won’t feel like you or the publisher are advertising to them. This exposes your work to a huge, engaged viewership and attracts new followers to your brand.
Native advertising creates a symbiotic relationship between publishers and brands. Publishers who do sponsored content right reap the benefits of another revenue stream and gain more audience trust if they promote a native ad from a trustworthy brand.
For brands, collaborating with prominent publishers can unleash unprecedented amounts of creativity to help them win over the publishers’ audience and boost engagement — as the click-through rate on native ads far exceeds traditional. For example, T Brand Studio, the New York Times native ad business, crafted sponsored posts that captured as much engagement as some of nytimes.com’s highest-performing articles.
To find the optimal native advertising opportunities for your brand, try using StackAdapt or Nativo.

Display Advertising
Display ads are a controversial topic in the digital marketing community. For almost 25 years, advertisers have abused them by tricking internet users into clicking misleading ads — some malicious display ads have even infected people’s computers with viruses. It’s easy to see why people have developed banner blindness and can’t stop downloading ad blockers: display ads have the reputation of being intrusive, distracting, and irrelevant.
On the other side of the spectrum, though, display advertising technology has advanced to the point where ad networks can leverage data and machine learning to offer advertisers more effective targeting strategies and consumers more relevant ads.
Ad networks like Google Display Network and Facebook’s Audience Network are the leaders in the banner ad renaissance. They can display your ads to the right target audience at the right place and time. And if you want more control of your advertising, they’ll let you decide where to place your ads. Below, we’ll cover each ad networks’ features and targeting capabilities:
1. Google Display Network
When you use Google’s Display Network, you can design visually appealing ads and place them on over two million websites and apps, YouTube, and Gmail.
You can also build new audiences by targeting people who are most likely to be interested in your product or service and remarket website visitors just by importing a list of their contact information.
If you don’t want to build out your ideal audience or deal with bidding, you can let Google Ads do it for you. Its automated targeting and bidding features can identify your highest-converting audience for the best return on investment.
Display ads can be most effective when retargeting an audience that’s already familiar with your brand.
2. Facebook’s Audience Network
With Facebook’s Audience Network, brands can expand their Facebook ad campaigns and use the same targeting data they use on the platform to advertise on a huge collection of websites and apps.
Brands can place native ads, banner ads, full-screen ads, in-stream video ads, and rewarded video ads (for example, “Watch this video ad to get more tokens!”) on the network’s websites and apps that their Facebook audience frequently visits.
This type of advertising can be particularly effective for mobile games, like in the example below from 5agame who was able to attribute 80% of their revenue through their rewarded video.

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Now that you know about all of the digital ad types that are available, the next step is to learn how to leverage the right ads for your business to achieve your goals.
If you want to continue leveling up your ads training, check out HubSpot Academy’s free course on the Digital Advertising Training Course.
Editor’s note: This post was originally published in April 2020 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

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Editor’s note: this post was updated for accuracy and freshness in September 2021.
Email marketing can take time to master. It involves keeping best practices in mind for every campaign you create, overcoming common rookie mistakes, and optimizing emails for increased engagement.
However, these practices alone do not ensure success. You must also understand how to measure the results of your efforts.
These metrics, like the rest of email marketing, are ever-changing, too. When features like Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection are released, there’s potential for change in how we view success in email marketing. So, it’s important to stay up-to-date.
Before you delve too deep into learning everything there is to know about email marketing, take a step back, determine what your goals are for email marketing, and then decide how you will measure your success.
Each email marketing campaign can be different, especially if you have different goals for different campaigns (e.g., generating leads and growing a subscriber base), but there are some basic metrics every email marketer should learn how to track.
Email Marketing Metrics Every Marketer Needs to Know
1. Open rate
Open rate has long been one of the simplest, and most universally used metrics by email marketers. Tracking the percentage of subscribers who open a specific email, open rate gives us insight into how engaged our subscribers are, as well as how effective different subject lines are.
That said, when Mail Privacy Protection is made publicly available by Apple, the feature will effectively disable open-tracking for users who opt in to using it, making open rate a relatively unreliable metric. And with more inbox providers set to follow suit, open rate will only become more and more unreliable.
Good thing there are plenty more metrics in this list for tracking success.
2. Click-through rate (CTR)
CTR is another common metric that can help you determine how well your campaigns are performing. CTR measures how many people clicked on the links in your email. For example, if you included a link to redeem an offer, the CTR would measure what percentage of subscribers clicked on your links.
When crafting an email, there are a few ways to increase click-through rates. For instance, include links throughout the email in appropriate places and add an eye-catching and conspicuous call-to-action button that subscribers can click on to redeem your offer.
Click-through rates are typically much lower than open rates. The average click-through rate for most campaigns is slightly over 4%.
3. Conversion rate
Your click-through rate measures how many people clicked your link, while your conversion rate will assess how many people clicked on the link and then completed a specific action. For example, if you included a link in your email for your subscribers to participate in a Black Friday sale, the conversion rate would tell you what percentage of the people who clicked the link made a purchase.
Conversion rates give you unique insight into your return on investment. When you know how much you have spent and how many subscribers are converting, it’s easier to determine whether or not the money you are putting into your campaign is paying off.
4. Bounce rate
When sending an email campaign, you also want to track the bounce rate. Bounce rate measures how many subscriber email addresses didn’t receive your email. Soft bounces track temporary problems with email addresses and hard bounces track permanent problems with email addresses.
Measuring bounce rates against open rates will give you a more solid idea of the quality of your subscriber lists. If you have a high percentage of hard bounces, your list may be full of fake email addresses, old email addresses, or addresses with mistakes in them.
You can preemptively decrease your bounce rates by requiring a double opt-in, which asks subscribers to verify their email address and confirm that they want to receive emails from your brand. A double opt-in requirement is a great option to help ensure higher quality email lists and lower bounce rates.
5. Number of unsubscribes
Measuring unsubscribes is very simple. Any email provider will tell you how many people unsubscribed upon receiving an email from you. This email metric can usually be found in your main dashboard or your metrics dashboard.
A high number of unsubscribes can be discouraging. However, email marketers prioritize this email marketing metric and often view unsubscribes as a good thing because they indicate that you are fine-tuning your subscriber list.
Additionally, clearly giving subscribers the opportunity to unsubscribe lets them know they have a choice as to what kind of content they will receive from your brand and when, which helps to build trust.
6. List growth rate
List growth rate is the metric to track the rate at which your list is growing.
You can calculate this by taking the number of new subscribers minus the number of unsubscribes, then divide that by the total number of email addresses on your list, and then multiply it by 100.
It’s natural to experience some attrition, so focus on ways to continually grow your list, engage subscribers, and find new loyal subscribers.
7. Spam complaints
It can be very discouraging for your emails to get marked as spam. You may prefer to ignore these instances but it’s important to pay attention to spam complaints.
Email service providers want to ensure quality and track spam complaints. If this rate gets too high,  it’s possible your email service provider will take action against you and block your account.
Your email service provider will likely track this number for you, but you may want to keep an eye on it yourself to make sure that nothing is technically wrong with your emails and that your copywriting meets your desired standards.
8. Forwarding rate/email sharing
Forwarding rate/email sharing measures the percentage of recipients who either shared your post via social media or forwarded it to a friend.
Forwarding rate or sharing is a helpful metric to track because it gives you an idea of how many brand advocates you have. It tells you what percentage of subscribers are recommending your emails to others.
Developing brand advocates through email marketing is a great strategy, especially considering 81% of consumer’s purchasing decisions are influenced by friends’ social media posts.
9. Engagement over time
Tracking engagement over time will give you information on the best times of day to send messages.
You can utilize automation in your email service provider to send emails based on customer behavior or trigger, but tracking engagement over time will tell you when you get the highest click rates for emails that are not automated.
Some email service providers automate this feature and will gather the data for you. However, it’s not a bad idea to track this metric on your own and determine when the best send times are for your industry and your subscriber base.
10. Overall ROI
Overall ROI is an email metric every marketer should track. It tells you the overall return on investment for your campaigns.
You can calculate this by taking the money you made in sales from the campaign minus the money you spent to execute the campaign, divide that by the money invested in the campaign, and then multiply that by 100.
Email marketing can be an investment but it also has the highest ROI out of any digital marketing strategy.
11. Email sharing rate
The email sharing rate indicates how many times a recipient shared your email through their social media, but has nothing to do with sharing the email through email.
This metric is calculated through the “share this” button on your email. To find this rate, divide the amount of “share this” clicks by the number of total emails delivered, then multiply by 100.
This stat allows you to establish some helpful email benchmarks as well.
12. Mobile open rate
This metric works in the same way that regular open rate does, except that it applies specifically to mobile devices like phones and tablets.
Unlike desktop open rates, which are more likely to occur during the weekday while people are at work, mobile open rates are more popular during the weekends.
Note, however, that this metric will also be affected by Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection feature — and not just because of the inability to track opens. MPP blocks our ability to see what kind of device or operating system a user is on, meaning we’ll no longer know if users are opening on a desktop device or a mobile device when they opt in to MPP.
13. Mobile click rate
Mobile click rates work the same as their desktop alternatives but are related to mobile devices like phones and tablets.
Mobile click rates are usually much lower than desktop click rates because users regularly operate multiple windows and other complicated browsing maneuvers, and these habits are much easier on a desktop than on a phone.
Similarly to mobile open rate, mobile click rate will be affected my MPP. But, if you’re primarily looking to reach your audience on their mobile device, it’s worth keeping in mind that weekends are typically the best time to do that.
14. Domain open rate
This rate is extremely important to ensure the success of your deliverability, which makes it one of the most important email marketing stats.
This rate allows you to see what percentage of people are opening your emails on a specific email provider. By doing so, you might be able to tell if you’re running into problems with a specific domain’s spam filter.
Again, you won’t be able to track this metric accurately for Apple Mail users, but it will still work for those who don’t opt in to MPP.
15. Domain click rate
Like the domain open rate, this will allow you to see how many people are clicking on your emails in a particular email provider.
This metric will help you see if there are any problems with an email domain’s spam policy by comparing the click rates between providers. All you have to do is find the average click rate between all providers, then compare it with the individual providers.
16. Revenue per email
The ROI will show you your overall return on investment, but analyzing the revenue per email will show you the individual success of the emails.
Determining this figure can help you easily figure out which emails are performing best and if there are any that are bringing down the total ROI.

Source: Really Good Emails
Focusing on metrics like clicks, web traffic, and conversations is the best way to track the ROI of a given email.
17. Revenue per subscriber
Like some of the other email marketing performance metrics, calculating revenue per subscriber allows for a more microscopic look at your ROI.
What sets this apart from revenue per email is its ability to parse out which demographics are resulting in revenue and which aren’t. By finding this out, you can either change the emails, focus less on a particular demographic, or reallocate your resources and concentrate on a particular demographic.
Wrap up
Those are the top 17 email marketing metrics every marketer should track. And, though some of these metrics are facing big changes, they’re all still worth knowing.
In terms of tracking the effectiveness of your campaigns, look for email marketing metrics that always:

Provide valuable data to direct email campaigns
Provide insight into user activity
Help keep your team focused on the goals of the campaign

As you set up campaign goals, these email metrics will help you measure your overall success as well as help you make necessary adjustments to your strategy.
For a rundown on all things Mail Privacy Protection, check out our comprehensive guide.
The post 17 Email Marketing Metrics Every Marketer Needs to Know appeared first on Campaign Monitor.

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You’ve probably heard that it’s crucial to keep a full, flowing funnel for a business. But what does this mean, and how do you know when you’re on the right track?

Funnel reporting is key to understanding the inner workings of your business. With a detailed funnel report, you can see where customers are at every stage of the sales process. The funnel report can show how many leads you are generating, what deals are being negotiated, what contracts are being finalized, and, ultimately, how many sales are going through.

Knowing your funnel at all times can help ensure that funnel doesn’t dry up, leaving you without leads or consistent sales. So, let’s dive into what exactly funnel reporting is and how to create a funnel report.
What is funnel reporting?
Before you understand funnel reporting, you need to understand the funnel. The funnel is essential to mapping out the customers’ journey to purchasing, from brand awareness all the way through to a sale. Keeping a funnel full of ongoing leads is important to a thriving business.
As such, a funnel report can give insight as to how a customer discovers your brand and what leads them to either flow through the funnel all the way to purchase or drop off somewhere along the way.
The funnel report can determine how effective your marketing efforts are, the number of people coming into the funnel, and conversion rates. This report can also provide insight into ongoing lead generation and sales, so you can see just how many leads you are generating and how many are in the process of signing contracts or making purchases.
1. Awareness
As the customer first enters your funnel, it’ll be through awareness. There are many ways a potential customer can first hear about your brand, whether they hear about your product through word of mouth, see an ad on Instagram, or pass your billboard while driving to work.
2. Interest
Once the customer has found your brand, if they like what they see, they’ll likely start doing some digging. Reading reviews, checking out your FAQ section, and comparing you to competitors are all likely to happen in this stage.
3. Decision
Now, the potential customer will start really considering making a purchase. They might consult with a sales rep or ask for pricing quotes.
4. Action
As the customer moves through the funnel, they will use the information gathered from the previous steps to decide whether or not to make a purchase. That’s why investing in excellent branding, marketing, and customer service is so important, as they will each leave an impact throughout the funnel process and can ultimately be a make-it-or-break-it situation for potential clients.
Ready to start reporting? Here’s how to create a funnel report. These reports can typically be generated through tools like Google Analytics. To make it easier, consider Dashboard & Reporting Software, which will house all your analytics, reports, and dashboards in one easy-to-navigate space.
1. Input Data
First and foremost, you’ll need to input data, from the number of customers clicking on your website link to the number of sales that go through and everything in between. This is something that can be automated and pulled for you through Google Analytics or HubSpot. You’ll set the number of building blocks to differentiate the different stages as well.
2. Filter
Next, you can filter out data you don’t need. The platform you use to create your funnel report will offer basic and/or customizable filter options.
3. Organize into Groups
To better analyze the report, you can organize the funnel by different marketing methods or products being sold. For example, you might create a funnel breakdown that separates the types of marketing used.
4. Visualize
Now, the platform will display the funnel report based on your filters and breakdowns. You’ll be able to see how many people found your website, then compare it to say, how many people made an inquiry, signed up for your newsletter, and/or purchased your products or services.
5. Note Strengths and Weaknesses
With your funnel in front of you, note conversions. See where customers are dropping off and where they are coming from. Your funnel report might show a lot of people coming in from social, despite most of your efforts being on email marketing, where less people are converting into sales. Noting your observations can help you adjust your future marketing strategies.
1. Next-Step Conversions
One of the simpler funnel reports is for next-step conversions. This funnel report will show the conversion rates between steps. So if you have 500 people see your social media ad, and 100 click through to your website, the conversion for this step is 20%.
2. Cumulative Conversions
Similarly, cumulative conversion funnel reports will also visualize conversion, but they will compare each stage’s numbers to the starting stage. This is most helpful when making comparisons to competitors or previous funnel reports.
3. Trends
A funnel trend will visualize changes in conversion rates as time goes on, for better or for worse. This can help you note what marketing strategies work and which ones don’t over time.
4. Time to Convert
How long does it take for a potential customer to make a purchase from the awareness stage to the action stage? A time-to-convert funnel will show how long it takes a customer to make it through each stage of the funnel.
5. Frequency
A frequency funnel report can help you identify what stage is most successful in drawing in customers or where customers tend to drop off.
Use Funnel Reports to Improve Marketing Strategies
A funnel report is an invaluable tool to track the progression of potential clients to customers making purchases. Knowing how clients become aware of your brand and what leads to them ultimately abandoning or making a purchase can help you sharpen your marketing skills.
A funnel report will allow you to visualize the weaker parts of your marketing strategies to improve them while also spotlighting successful — sometimes surprisingly-so — components of the funnel.