KPIs to Drive Better Marketing Decisions and Results
Data is the cornerstone of marketing results, but have your efforts paid off — literally? Are you tracking the right metrics and using them to inform your decisions? If not, you risk throwing good money after bad, which could be the make-or-break difference for your business.
Firstly, it’s important to understand what key performance indicators (KPIs) are and what they are not. Key performance indicators (KPIs) measure how multiple levels of an organization are performing at achieving a certain goal or objective. Essentially, KPIs are metrics that gauge overall performance over time.
What they are:
- Quantifiable/measurable and actionable.
- Measure factors that are critical to success.
- Tied to business goals and targets.
- Limited to 5-8 key metrics.
- Applied consistently throughout the company.
What they are not:
- Vague or unclear metrics.
- Metrics that are not actionable.
- Reports i.e. search engines, keywords.
- Exhaustive set of metrics.
Uncover your KPIs in a matter of minutes using this tried and tested formula:
Step 1: Define Your Objective
Outline the major objective of your marketing campaigns. For example, to bring in more visitors and drive more lead sign-ups.
Step 2: Define the Measurable Success
Determine which KPIs are most valuable to the success of your strategies and bottom line. So, which marketing KPIs are important? Although the specifics depend on your industry, marketing KPIs should be meaningful, concentrate on material gains, and align and guide your brand’s strategic positioning and direction. Most fall into three categories: financial, website performance, and social.
Financial
The goal of all marketing is ultimately to generate more revenue for your business.
One of the most basic indicators is total revenue. More specifically, you’ll want to know the average customer value. In other words, by figuring out how much you can expect to make from each new lead, you’ll be able to determine how much you are willing to spend on attracting them. Along the same lines, your cost per lead (CPL) will be how much, on average, it costs you to attract a potential client.
Website Performance
Your website can provide a ton of insight into your demographic, consumer behavior, and such.
By measuring the volume of unique visitors to your site over time, you can see whether or not new people are discovering your business.
Beyond this, tracking where your visitors are coming from can help you decide where to focus your strategy. Traffic can come from organic searches, links from other sites, and various other sources.
In addition to this is behavior. Bounce rate and conversions will provide insight into site visit quality and your target objectives. For example, if the desired action was filling out a form, but users leave before converting, you would need to rethink your strategy.
Social
Social metrics help you evaluate the success of your social media marketing efforts and engagement. Engagement is how a customer or lead interacts with you through likes, shares, comments, messages, tags, or mentions.
How to Use KPIs to Make Real Marketing Decisions
Track and Report
Create a custom dashboard in Google Analytics or your automation software to analyze and report KPIs.
Collect Actionable Data With Analytics Tools
To start, you need to define your goals. Goals measure how and when people complete the specific actions you want. Without these, it’s almost impossible to evaluate the effectiveness of your online business or marketing campaigns.
In Analytics, you can add new goals and modify any existing ones.
- Demographics give you a more detailed look at your audience’s age, gender, language, and geographical location. Psychographics are often overlooked yet highly useful when learning more about your audience’s behavior.
- How are people finding you? A referral is a page that leads people to your site.
Under “Referrals”, you’ll see the pages sending traffic to your site as well as other key metrics, including the number of sessions, bounce rate, and goal conversion rate.
- Uncovering your highest-performing keywords can improve your search engine optimization (SEO) and increase conversion rates. Once you figure out what people are searching for, you can capitalize on those successful keywords to expand your reach.
- Do a deep dive into your bounce rate by first looking at your most popular pages. Diagnose the problem and A/B test to optimize for traffic.
- The advanced segments feature lets you hone your marketing strategies by filtering data and splitting your audience into groups based on shared characteristics. Examples include: where they are in the sales funnel, the products or product categories that interest them, and their age, location, and gender.
It’s All About Quality — Not Quantity
Data is the fundamental proof marketers should use to create campaigns and inform marketing decisions. KPIs should be the focal point of your data collection and analysis process. The key is to see the big picture by analyzing the entire customer journey and lifecycle.
Learn more about the benefits bLoyal can offer your brand by talking with our experts!
