With so many marketing metrics mislabelled as essential marketing KPIs to track for successful marketing engagement, marketers today often find themselves wondering which are the most important to pay attention to.
Each metric—and there are a seemingly infinite amount in marketing—along with the proactive maintenance required for successful marketing performance indication can make you question which KPIs should stand out as the headlines for making objective business decisions.
Knowing which ones to focus on can be the difference between fast, efficient business communication and overwhelmed marketers who struggle to glean customer insight from the plethora of data points in front them.
There is hope however through online marketing services that can help marketers collate the most important KPIs into digestible dashboards that can quickly steer business leaders effectively, thanks to concise summaries of overall business marketing performance. We list the 12 most important marketing KPIs you should be tracking to stay aware of how your marketing efforts are demonstrating measurable business value.
What are marketing KPIs?
Marketing key performance indicators (KPIs) are metrics used to track the success of your marketing efforts. Examples would include the number of visitors your website receives, or the number of qualified leads that come out of your direct mail campaigns.
For example, the digital CRM platform Hubspot is an effective tool tool that tracks analytics to show which content, pages, and email campaigns are providing the best click through rates. Hubspot integrates a variety of other resources as well, such as Salesforce, to help users track data across a variety of platforms.
What are digital marketing KPIs?
Digital marketing KPIs are metrics designed to measure the performance of your online marketing efforts. Examples of digital marketing KPIs would include Cost Per Click (CPC), Conversion Optimisation Rate (CRO), and impressions. For social media marketers, platforms such as Facebook make it relatively easy for users to incorporate guided advertising methods as well as audience insights, which allows for paid advertising to reach people more likely to engage with your content.
What are email marketing KPIs?
Email marketing KPIs are metrics designed to measure the performance of your email marketing campaigns. Examples of email marketing KPIs would include open rate, clickthrough rate, and bounce rate.
Mailchimp, a well-known easy-to-use email platform, provides a variety of templates for marketing novices to send out to audiences big and small. Content can range from sales, to event notices, and the technology provides you with insights regarding your outreach so you can properly track your email marketing KPIs.
1. Sales Revenue Growth
One of the first priorities of marketing KPI tracking is sales revenue growth, or how much your sales revenue grows or declines each year.
Klipfolio.com it states, “All eyes are focused on sales numbers and achieving monthly, quarterly, and annual growth. What’s fascinating about the sales growth metric is that it can act as a rallying call for your entire team.”
Sales revenue growth is the number one marketing key metric to track and can be expressed as an amount or as a percentage year over year. Tracking whether your sales increase or decline each year and by how much is clearly a no-brainer.
The NPS measures customer loyalty and how likely your customers are to recommend you to others, based on a scale of 1-10. The Net Promoter Score is typically created from survey data, meaning this marketing KPI requires customer input for real time consumer-centric feedback on business performance.
After an appropriate sample size of your customers respond, you can calculate the NPS. A customer who scores you six or lower is a detractor, while someone who scores you as a 9 or 10 is a promoter. Simply subtract the number of detractors from promoters, divide by the number of respondents, and multiply by 100 to get your own NPS.
3. Lead Generation Acquisition
Lead generation acquisition ties the amount of money that you spend in advertising to the number of qualified leads that are returned. Lead generation acquisition can also be referred to as cost per lead (CPL) and is a major indicator of whether people are responding to your ads.
Tracking the effectiveness of your lead generation acquisition will tell you whether your ads are in line with the product or service that you sell, and if people connect with your brand proposition enough to want to learn more.
4. Lead Generation Retention
Lead generation retention refers to the percentage of leads converted. This digital marketing KPI shows how strong your leads are and how well your salesforce or website can close the sale.
A low lead generation retention score might mean that your leads aren’t very qualified but could also mean your salesforce isn’t closing effectively enough. Setting growth targets for lead generation retention in any development department is a good idea, as the metric is a good indicator of their performance.
5. SEO Keyword Rankings
A digital marketing KPI that is as important, and perhaps even more valuable in a sense than any other on the list thanks to the free traffic it offers your business, is SEO keyword rankings. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process of targeting popular search terms via your own brand content.
To understand how website users, especially new site visitors who present a new customer conversion opportunity, are landing on your website from a search engine, you need to understand why key search terms your website is ranking for. From here, you can both analyse if you are happy with the terms your website is associated with or re-evaluate you search marketing efforts, and widen or change the search terms your business website targets. How you perform against those targeted keywords makes up your SEO keyword rankings.
Successful SEO campaigns can be achieved through both on page and technical SEO tactics. Altering the copy and media on your website to match search terms and be digitally accessible and engaging, for example, is a great way to move up Google search rankings.
Requesting and utilizing backlinks from partners and writing optimized SEO copy are among the most recognized ways to drive organic web traffic via search engines. Compiling a weekly or monthly report on your SEO keyword rankings can help you adapt your SEO strategy for improved SEO keyword ranking on search engine results pages.
6. Paid Digital Marketing ROI
Paid digital marketing ROI will tell you how your paid marketing strategy is performing overall. Paid digital marketing ROI exhibits whether or not your paid digital advertising is generating revenue for your firm against how much the business is spending, and is directly tied to its profits and customer acquisition costs.
If you set goals for your paid ads budget and set out to achieve them, you’ll want to be tracking your paid digital marketing ROI.
Tracking the love that your content receives on social media seems like a no-brainer, but with all of the different KPIs for social media marketing, you may wonder which are the most important for the success of your business.
The number of times your content is shared, commented on, saved, liked and viewed in the case of video and stories, all amounts to the engagement performance of your social media marketing efforts.
Impressions may be viewed as important to some, but should be avoided as they do not account for the effectiveness of your content. True, organic social media interaction is still the metric to track when searching out KPIs for social media marketing.
8. Landing Page Conversion Rates
Another digital marketing key metric is landing page conversion rates. Knowing conversation rates can help you answer: which are my best business entry pages? So you know which webpages to keep maintained as a priority. Landing pages are specifically designed to prompt a customer into action. This may be a click through to another site page, a sale or a sign-up, so understanding if your landing page is meeting that objective is crucial for understanding the correlation between customer conversion and business sales or audience engagement.
This is particularly true if your landing pages are used for counting cross-channel content marketing campaign conversions from media such as TV adverts, OOH advertising, social media link trees and email newsletters. Conversions can mean different things depending on varying company objectives. For example, you may wish to convert a desktop website user to a mobile website user if your website had just become responsive.
Generally however, conversions refer to which of your website pages convinced the consumer to take a desired marketing action, such as sign-up for your service, follow a business social media account, or buy a particular product. This metric is especially helpful to know if you are implementing A/B testing for a dynamic website or looking into a digital brand re-design as it can tell you how engaging both new and returning site visitors find your content, if they're driven to act based on how much they like it.
9. Time Spent on Site
Time spent on site is an important digital marketing KPI worth tracking, as it will tell you how engaged users are with the content on your website. You can quite literally learn the value of your site to customers, and understand why sales are up or down based on how much time a customer feels it is worth investing to spend on your business website. Digging in to this metric can explain how and where to make your digital offering more valuable to the customers personal needs and therefore more profitable to you from a business perspective.
Generally, the lower the user’s time spent on site means the less effective the content is. Businesses can increase the amount of time that users spend on a site by offering fresh content regularly, including compelling video and interactive, useful content and keeping an up-to-date blog that addresses how your product or service adds value to the customer's life.
10. Landing Page Load Speeds
With so many different apps, devices, and entertainment outlets fighting for consumer attention, having an efficient landing page is priority. Load speed as a metric is very closely related to time spent on website as it measures ease of accessibility to your product or service.
Unless your product or service is very unique, a customer with little time or low internet bandwidth isn't going to spend minutes waiting to see your website load if they can find a similar product faster. Quality and price will not matter if they can't actually see your product in action after all.
If your landing pages have large uncompressed graphics or videos and don’t load quickly enough to keep a user engaged, consider that engagement lost and highly unlikely to ever return. A split second is all that’s needed to lose a potential buyer’s attention to a competitor, so does your page really load fast enough? It may be costing your business money.
11. Email Unsubscribe Rates
Email unsubscribe rate is a good barometer for how engaging your content is and whether your audience finds your material relevant. High email unsubscribe rates can arise from cross-promotions and similar database sharing techniques where the subscriber is not fully engaged with the content to begin with. It can also let you know whether or not your communications are too infrequent, too irrelevant or too often.
12. Video Content Completion Rates
Finally, among the content marketing KPIs that are most influential for small business owners are video content completion rates. These rates will show how often your viewers watch your video content from start to finish.
Tracking these rates will tell you what percentage of your audience is truly captivated by your message and has at least a core understanding of your principles and what you offer.
Final thoughts
These 12 marketing metrics that you should be tracking are a well-rounded group of ideas that cover digital marketing KPIs, advertising KPIs, email marketing KPIs, content marketing KPIs, and even KPIs for social media marketing. Tracking the marketing metrics and marketing KPIs in this article will leave you ahead of the curve and prepared to effectively allocate dollars to grow your business.
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