We all want to know if our marketing campaigns are working and if our strategy is on track, but how? Key performance indicators (KPIs) are a great way!
It’s crucial to invest your time and money at the right place, and for that, you need to track your efforts with marketing KPIs that will help you make the right decisions. Not sure where to start? That’s what this article is for, to help you choose the right metrics for your business.
How to Choose the Best KPIs?
First things first, you need to choose KPIs that are in line with your business objectives. If your main objective is brand awareness, you will most likely track different metrics from different marketing channels than if you put most of your efforts in SEO or lead generation.
To determine the right KPIs for your business, you need to first ask yourself what your objectives are: more leads, more traffic, a better conversion rate? Then, with the strategies you put in place for your objectives, you need to track the data that will give you the best answer to the question: did our efforts work out? Where could our campaigns be improved?
For example, if your objective is to gain more traffic, and that you use SEO to help you attain these objectives, you should, of course, track your organic traffic and conversion rate, but also your SERP, and best-performing keywords to have a better idea of how your strategies are performing.
Depending on your marketing strategies, there are particular KPIs that can help you make the right marketing investments so that you can gain new leads, new website visitors, and more sales revenue.
The Basic Digital Marketing KPIs You Should Track
No matter the type of business, your strategies or goals, these four key metrics will give you a good overview of your current business’ performance.
With these metrics, you can see how much it costs to bring a new lead, how much money a customer will typically bring, and the overall conversion rate from lead to client for your different marketing channels.
- Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
- This KPI is the total amount of money a customer is expected to spend in your business, or on your products, during their lifetime. It’s an important metric to track to know if you end up spending more on getting new customers than they bring to your business.
- Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
- This KPI represents the total cost of bringing a customer to your company.
- Return on Investment (ROI)
- The return on investment is the total amount of money you are making, minus what it costs you to do so.
- Conversion Rate
- Your conversion rate is the number of visitors to your website that completed a desired goal (a conversion) out of the total number of visitors.
KPIs for Your Search Engine Optimisation Strategy
For your SEO there are multiple marketing metrics to track, here are some of the most popular KPIs that should help you track your efforts effectively.
Website sessions
With metrics about your website traffic, you can see how much of your traffic is organic, where they came from (what channel, what device), how many pages your traffic looks at in a typical visit, do they come back? And how long do they stay? With these questions answered, you can have an overall portrait of your audience behaviour and see if your website has any issues to solve such as organic content, UX, page load time, mobile UX, if your traffic is qualified, etc.
- Organic search visits (organic traffic)
- Bounce rate
- Page views
- Average page load time
- Pages per visit from organic
- Visit by channel
- Visits by device
- New vs returning visitors
Conversions
It’s also very important to track your conversions. Particularly your organic conversions and revenue from organic traffic since this is the goal of your SEO strategies after all.
- Organic conversions
- Revenues from organic
- Transaction from organic
Keywords
With these keyword KPIs you can see which keywords are performing best for your website, may it be by clicks, impressions, CTR, or average position.
- Best performing keywords by clicks
- Best performing keywords by impressions
- Best performing keywords by CTR
- Best performing keywords by average position
Social Media Marketing KPIs
Social media channels such as Linkedin, Facebook, and Twitter, can help you with brand awareness, customer satisfaction, customer retention, and it’s also another traffic source for your website.
Here are some marketing metrics that should help you determine if your social marketing activities are paying off.
Likes & Followers
A great gauge to see if your audience likes your content, are metrics like Followers and Likes. You can have a great overview of if your likes and followers are growing with time.
- Page likes
- New likes
- Followers
- Follower growth
Impressions
You probably create social media posts to get some reach outside of just your followers, so it’s important to track your impressions, reach and frequency.
- Impressions
- Social media reach
- Frequency
Engagements
Another very important part of social media is the engagement you have to your audience. It’s crucial to know which posts brought the most clicks, views, comments, shares, etc. so that you can adjust your content accordingly.
- Social share
- Comment
- Clicks
- Video views
- Engagement rate
- Post Likes
Paid Marketing KPIs
One of the most important marketing channels is paid marketing, with Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Bing Ads, and many other advertising opportunities and PPC tools. You need to know how many qualified leads visited your landing pages, how much it costs, and if you got new customers with these efforts. Here are some paid marketing KPIs you can track.
Clicks and cost data
The first goal of your PPC campaign is to get clicks, and the cheaper the click the better. So you need to know how many clicks you got, the click-through rate, and how much it cost per click and acquisition.
- Clicks
- Cost Per Click (CPC)
- Click-Through Rate (CTR)
- Cost
- Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)
Conversions
Once they clicked on your ad, did they convert to clients? These conversion KPIs are particularly important, you need to know if your audience converts into clients for each of your PPC campaigns and adjust accordingly.
- Conversion
- Assisted conversion
- Conversion rate
- Conversion value
Revenues
At the end of the day, the number one goal is getting more revenues. So make sure to track your total revenues, return on ad spend, ROI, Quality score and more.
- Total Revenues
- Return On Ad Spend (ROAS)
- Return on investment (ROI)
- Revenue Share (RPC)
- Quality Score
Email Marketing KPIs
Did your email marketing campaigns bring new website traffic? New customers or subscribers? You need to track some key metrics for this marketing channel as well:
- Signup Rate
- How many of your visitors subscribed to your newsletter? This metric is particularly important if you are doing marketing efforts to gain more subscribers.
- Open Rate
- You don’t send emails for nothing, you want your subscribers to open them. Your open rate is one of the most important metrics to track for each email you send. Tracking the open rate can also help you optimise your subject line.
- Click-Through Rate (CTR)
- Once the email has been opened, did it work to bring customers to your website? You need to track the CTR to see if your audience clicked on your email links.
- Email sent
- The number of emails sent.
- Bounce Rate
- The number of emails that did not reach the audience. Hard bounces; when an email can’t be delivered (invalid email address or unexpected error during sending) Soft bounces: (temporary delivery issue).
- Unsubscribes
- Just as it is crucial to know your number of signups, the unsubscribe rate can also give you very important information, It can tell you if you send too many emails, if your content is not what your audience wants, and more.
Note from Kym: When tracking your email marketing KPIs, the interactive graphs in the Vision6 report dashboard make it super easy. You can monitor all of these KPIs in real-time and there’s also a Google Analytics integration, so you can see what subscribers do on your website after they click from your email.
How to Track Your KPIs
Of course, there are plenty other KPIs you could track depending on your marketing activities, such as web analytics data from Google Analytics; referral traffic, churn rate, unique visitors, etc. Possibilities are pretty much endless, and it all depends on your own objectives and strategies.
You can track all these metrics by manually entering this data into excel spreadsheets, Google Sheets, PowerPoints, or other presentation tools. However, to save some time and effort, you can also use automated reporting tools such as DashThis, this way, you don’t have to spend time manually gathering all these metrics.
There are multiple ways to save time with marketing automation nowadays, so don’t hesitate to take advantage of all of them!
