Digital marketing is taking the business world by storm. Approximately 83% of businesses believe that their current digital marketing efforts are successful in assisting their goals.
Billions of people worldwide now use the internet to do their shopping, research businesses, and receive recommendations for products and services. This makes refining your digital marketing strategies more important than ever.
In my decade as CEO of a digital marketing agency, I’ve never met a company yet that succeeded in creating a refined digital marketing campaign without first coming up with equally effective key performance indicators (KPIs) for the strategies.
I’m absolutely convinced that the key to choosing KPIs is to contextualize them with your business. You must match them not only to your goals, but also to a host of other factors, such as your strengths and weaknesses and the life stage of your business.
The following tips will help you craft KPIs that are robust and effective in monitoring your strategy’s progress:
1. Relate to business goals.
Your KPIs should be directly related to your business goals. This will allow you to keep a finger on the pulse of your campaigns. If your current goal is to raise awareness, at least one of your KPIs should be about how often users share your social media posts. If your goal is to increase revenue, choose to track conversion rates and actual sales instead.
Identify your goals, and determine which KPIs are most relevant to accomplishing them.
2. Address problems, and acknowledge successes.
Don’t just focus your KPIs on your digital marketing campaign’s strengths. They’re also important in making sure you’re making progress in addressing your weaknesses. If your social media marketing efforts are succeeding, your KPIs will be able to determine why they’re successful. On the other hand, if your search engine optimization tactics aren’t taking hold, your KPIs can identify problems.
Click rates, bounce rates and how long people stay on your pages can all point out your campaign’s problems.
3. Tie KPIs to company size.
In my experience, companies and businesses have life stages. Every stage has different requirements you have to meet to progress to the next stage. Startups are often more concerned with acquiring more customers and expanding their business. Bigger companies often aim to outshine competitors and maintain their current markets. Find KPIs that address these concerns.
Unique site visits and conversion rates are ideal for keeping an eye on an expanding customer base. For larger companies, customer engagement and search engine page results rankings are ideal for monitoring your control over the market.
4. Simplicity is key.
At this point in time, it’s clear that KPIs can be versatile, and monitoring a few all-important indicators could yield better results than keeping an eye on dozens of them. Tracking too many KPIs requires multiple tools and lots of time to decipher. It may also bog you down with too much information and lead to bad judgment calls.
Rather than risk getting confused by a deluge of information, keep your KPIs simple and manageable so you can focus on important metrics.
5. Choose KPIs suited to your industry.
Every industry has different requirements, hence the need to monitor different KPIs. Tailor which KPIs you’re going to keep track of to your specialty.
For example, online stores should look at online sales first given their businesses rely solely on digital interactions. Customer satisfaction is also an important KPI for these businesses. If you’re running an online media company, your KPIs should include unique visitors and how long they spend exploring your site.
Effective Digital Marketing KPIs
After creating countless marketing campaigns for our customers, I’ve learned that beyond website traffic and search engine results page rankings, there are several KPIs that are important to any digital marketing effort:
• Traffic-To-Lead Ratio
This metric will keep you informed on how effective your site is in creating leads. For example, if your site is visited a thousand times a month but only generates a single lead in the same period, it may be sensible to update your content and lead generation tactics.
Establish your current ratio, and monitor if it changes after every site update and throughout your campaign.
• Popular Pages
While you’re measuring how long your visitors spend on your site, find out which pages they’re frequenting the most. This will give you a clue on which type of content or service appeals the most to your visitors. Are they more interested in your blog posts rather than your service pages? Do they prefer going to one service page rather than another? Identifying which pages are the most popular gives an idea of what you’re doing right and where your site needs improvement.
• Traffic Source
Discovering how visitors reach your site tells you which of your digital marketing strategies are paying off and which ones are not being optimized properly.
If your site receives more traffic from referrals, which means they reached your site through a link on another website, you may need to boost your other campaigns. On the other hand, if you get a lot of traffic from your social media posts, you’re doing something right with your tactics in that area. Increased traffic from direct searches could indicate an increase in public awareness of your business.
• Customer Engagement
Mapping out which pages and what content gets your customers’ attention and leads to more engagement helps you focus on improving your tactics. Are customers leaving more comments on your social media posts rather than on your site? Leverage this information to increase your presence on social media while optimizing your site to draw users to your pages.
The digital landscape is changing, and it’s changing fast. It’s important that you’re not only aware of how to choose effective KPIs, but also what kinds of indicators are ideal for improving your performance. Staying one step ahead of the competition requires the best KPIs and the best digital marketing strategies you can find.
