These days, an overwhelming amount of data seems to be at our fingertips. It is hard to sort through which data points really matter when looking at your business’s marketing.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are the metrics that measure the success of your overall business objectives.
While every business may have unique objectives and metrics to track, when it comes to digital marketing, there are a few standard KPIs every entrepreneur should track to ensure they are meeting their goals.
- Website Traffic
Website traffic is a key indicator of how well your message is getting out into the world. Website traffic drives interest in your products or services, educates potential customers, can help retain existing clients and engage new clients.
Without website visitors, you have no way of converting people from a cold audience to a warm lead.
Get a free Google Analytics account and look at the following numbers each month:
- Sessions – how many total visits to your site (Great, you’re getting traffic!)
- Users – how many people have visited your site
- New v. Returning users – do you have returning users? (Nice! Now how can your marketing efforts get more people back to your site?)
- Top landing pages – these are pages people visit most (Your home page is usually near the top. What other pages are getting traffic – can you optimize those with an email sign-up form?)
- Bounce Rate – this tells you when someone reaches your site and immediately closes the window – this should be under 60% and closer to 40-50% ideally. (Not looking so hot? Check where your traffic comes from (see below) and look at your site on all devices to see if there is anything that may turn people off)
- Device category – desktop, mobile and tablet (Which devices are used most? Optimize your website’s view for those.)
- Sessions by Traffic Source (This tells you where your traffic comes from)
- Direct – someone typed your website or through browser bookmarks, or if a traffic source cannot be identified it will be marked as direct traffic
- Organic – traffic that arrives through a search engine result
- Referral – traffic that came from an outside source, when someone clicks on a hyperlink
- Social – a type of referral traffic, but specifically referred from social channels (Are you sending people from social to your website? Watch this number and see if you can get it higher.)
When you get to a more advanced stage of using Google Analytics you can set goals and track your customers’ actions in more detail. For now, use the above items to improve your website and marketing efforts.
- Email List
A favorite tool we use for our clients, email marketing is powerful! We like to capture website visitors with a free email sign-up to grow their lists. We do this as a lead generation tool.
When a user visits your website, who’s to say they’ll ever come back? The vast majority won’t. We collect email addresses before they bounce from our site, so we have another opportunity to warm them up.
Once someone says yes to your email offer (this can be through a popup or a web form on your site that offers visitors something of value in exchange for their email address), you’re golden. Now is the time to create quality emails that are useful, educational, entertaining, inspirational or just plain useful.
The biggest key to email is your subject line! That is the first thing they see (besides your name). But when you are new to someone, your name may not entice them to open the email. You have to provide a great subject line that captures what you are about to share in a way that taps into their emotions.
Which brings us to how do we know your emails are doing well? Track your open rate, click rate and deliverability rates.
Most email marketing software programs have comparisons for your industry’s average open and click rates to compare and ensure you are within standards.
The deliverability rate will indicate how many emails are delivered versus how many emails may have problems – or bounce. Check these monthly and don’t let your deliverability rate get below 95%. If it does, it’s time to clean up your list (most email platforms have easy-to-use tools for this).
- Social media tracking
The goal of using social media for your business is to build relationships with your community and then turn them into customers.
Each month, check the following social media analytics and then use Google Analytics (see above) to determine how your social is driving traffic to your website, which in turn should be collecting leads or email subscribers.
- Monthly engaged people/engagement rate (this will tell you that people like your content and interact with it)
- Monthly page reach and engagement (while not vital, these tell the story of how much exposure your content receives and is an indicator of the quality of your content)
- Total clicks (this means people like the content)
- Reactions, Comments and Shares are all calculated in your engagement rate, but we recommend looking at the breakdown (Look at the post breakdown and see if you can identify content that is most popular and create more of that)
- Paid Advertising
Monitor the monthly leads you generate from each advertising channel. Track your click-through-rates, cost-per-click and your conversion rates as an overall way to track the performance of ads.
Create some urgency and calls to action to help guide the potential customers through the next step in their customer journey.
Use paid advertising campaigns that are targeted to specific audiences that reflect your customer’s journey.
For instance, run an email list-building ad to a cold audience that fits your ideal customer’s demographics to grow your email list and nurture them through a series of emails designed to educate and ultimately offer your products or services.
Then run a more targeted ad to your email subscribers that give them a more direct offer.
Then track the click-through-rates and conversion rates to see what performs best. Test different ad copy and images to improve performance and be sure it reflects your unique value proposition.
- Lead Generation
How are you tracking new leads each month?
What are your lead generation channels and customer acquisition process?
Do you have a CRM?
Does your company have a sales process?
These things can look vastly different in each business. The key is to know how you generate leads and then how you nurture those leads to become consumers of your products or services.
Then track how much you spend on those channels and acquisitions and how many customers you get each month from those efforts to give you a Return on Investment (ROI).
Say you run a Facebook ad to your eCommerce store, how many sales do you make and how much did you spend on those ads?
Do you sell to your list of email subscribers? How much do you pay to generate those emails and how many sales do you make through email marketing?
Tracking leads and determining the ROI is a big challenge for most businesses. Usually, because there are numerous channels bringing in leads, sometimes it’s difficult to assign where a lead came from.
Great news! You don’t have to be exact, but keeping track, knowing where your customers come from and the channels you spend time and money on are important. Use this information to determine if your channels are bringing you leads, or if you need to adjust your strategy or change your channels.
Using KPIs to Make Better Decisions
While KPIs are useful in tracking your progress and the effectiveness of your digital campaigns, they are a guide to help you make better-educated decisions about your goals, strategies and tactics.
Use these KPIs to optimize and improve your website, emails, social campaigns, ads, and content.
Tracking KPIs is an ongoing effort. In Plain Sight Marketing can help you with strategy, planning and implementation of your marketing and public relations campaigns to help you drive meaningful results. Contact Us Today to see how we can work together.
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