Right now, depending on the industry, companies spend about 11 percent of their revenue on average on marketing. So, if revenue generation is the end goal of marketing for your organization, it’s natural that marketers there would expect a return of more than the amount outlaid – typically a multiplier of that. The big question for marketing is always: How do you make sure you’re on the path to achieving that goal? What are the key performance indicators (KPIs) worth tracking? It’s an easy thing to say “we’ll measure everything,” but in practical terms, many marketing departments have to pick and choose which goals to really focus on, because they can only act on so many KPIs and benchmarks. And the hard part is that not all types marketing activities can (or should) be measured in a simple revenue metric.
But before we get to the metrics, we would encourage you to think first about the overall goal. Aren’t these the same thing? Well, no. The overall goal question is actually a bigger one: What’s the impact a marketer or a marketing team would like to see from all their activities for a particular campaign or ongoing work? In other words, what’s the audience behavior they would like to see? Some might call this the critical success factor(s) of all the activities. For example, the end goal might be to increase overall revenue from a benchmark by 15 percent. Or, it might be to generate a certain 20 percent more registrations or downloads. Or it could mean a 25 percent increase in engagement.
After you’ve defined the overall goal, then comes the stage for setting KPIs that define successful achievement to that overall goal. At this point, it’s important to think about how funnels truly work based on the buyer journey and benchmark data. For example, I might need a million impressions to generate 10,000 click-throughs to a website, which would generate 300 people putting a particular product into the cart and 100 of them converting into a sale. At each of those stages, I would want to measure the KPIs along the way. For individual users, I might need to put something with the brand in front of them 7 to 13 times before they actually convert. So just doing a one-time campaign in one aspect of digital marketing might not be feasible either.
Given the complex nature of most businesses, we wouldn’t be able to dictate which KPIs for you to use in your situations. But you should ask yourself, which ones make sense to measure on the journey toward the larger goal. With that in mind, we’ve put together a sampling of KPIs across various 10 marketing distribution areas you can use:
Website/Page Content KPIs
- Page views
- Pages per visit
- Unique visits
- Bounce rate
- Time on site
- Social engagement (shares, comments, reviews)
- Average revenue per visit
Lead-Generation KPIs (Website)
- Overall lead generation
- Lead conversion rate
- Lead form abandonment rate
- Leads per day/month
- Content downloads
- Marketing qualified leads
- Sales qualified leads
Email KPIs
- Open rate
- Total opens
- Click-through rate
- Total clicks
- Forwards/referrals
- Conversion rate
- Total conversions
- Total conversion revenue (from clicks)
- Unsubscribe rate
- Total unsubscribes
- Newsletter/email subscriber rate
- Lead/sales generated
- Avg. advertising income per page
- Avg. ad income per visitor
- Total ad revenue
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) KPIs
- Ranking improvement: Improved position(s) for a monitored keyword term
- Overall rank improvement for all monitored keywords, say the top 500.
- Top keywords
- Top landing page destinations
- Bounce rate on landing pages
- Pages per visit
- Total search traffic (from Google, Bing etc.)
Podcasting KPIs
- Podcast Completion Rate
- Total Listens
- Total Downloads
- Total Subscriptions
Video KPIs
- Total video views
- Completion rate
- Repeat visitor rate
- CTRs to product or lead pages
- Revenue lift
- Total revenue
- Total ad revenue (if ad supported)
Social KPIs
- Number of active followers
- Likes
- Comments
- Click-throughs
- Impressions
- Shares
- Mentions
- Total lead generation
- Total conversions
- Total revenue
Paid Search KPIs
- Ad impressions
- Click-through rate
- Total clicks
- Cost-per-click
- Bounce Rate (landing pages)
- Pages per visit
- Total keyword traffic (individual and aggregate)
- Cost-per-acquisition (CPA)
- Return on investment (ROI)
Native and Display KPIs
- Brand recall
- Total ad impressions (for a campaign or individual ad)
- Click-through rate
- Total clicks
- Direct website landing page views
- Total conversions
- Cost per acquisition
- ROI
- Revenue contribution
E-Commerce KPIs
- Unique visitors
- Unique page views
- Product page views (aggregate and Individual)
- Average revenue per order
- Average products per cart
- Total unique carts
- Total signed-in (registered customers)
- Total unique payment screen visits
- Total add-ons
- Total checkout completions
- Checkout completion/conversion rate (compared to unique visitors)
- Total abandoned carts
- Total revenue
- Avg. revenue per visit
The KPIs, of course, aren’t there to measure just for measurement’s sake. But should be used to gauge how successful a marketer is at any stage of the buyer journey. So, if certain indicators are lagging behind a particular benchmark, marketers can make adjustments to the plan as necessary and optimize to hit that particular KPI target.
At Marketing Nice Guys, we provide a comprehensive, two-day training course on 12 digital marketing areas, including analytics, measurement, and KPIs. Contact us to schedule a training today or customize a virtual or in-person event to your needs.
