How do you know if your marketing efforts are working? One way to measure your campaign effectiveness as a small business is to benchmark and track key performance indicators (KPIs) – a set of quantifiable measures that gauge or compare performance on the path toward meeting your strategic or operational goals.

For example, let’s say your overall goal as a small business – or critical success factor (CSF) – is to make $1 million this year. Your KPIs are those things that tell you whether or not you’re on track to do that. So, one KPI might be that you need 300,000 site visits this year, or that you need 20,000 add-to-carts based on your current conversion rate.   

If you set the right KPIs for different marketing channels, it will not only provide you data on how well each channel is doing but also where along the marketing path your potential customers may be falling off.

One tip: Set up your KPI benchmarks based on “reality” – for example, it’s probably unrealistic to set 4 million visits to your website if you only did 1 million the past year.   

Finally, KPIs can vary between companies and industries. For digital, different initiatives require different measures. To help you, we’ve provided some examples of KPIs used in different marketing channels that you can begin measuring:

Website KPIs

Overall

• • Page views
  • Unique visits
  • Bounce rate
  • Pages per visit
  • Time on site
  • Social engagement/shares/comments/reviews
  • Browser / Device used

Blogs/Content Sites:

• • Subscriber rate
  • Lead/sales generated
  • advertising income per page
  • advertising income per visitor
  • Total ad revenue

Lead-generation site:

• • Overall lead generation
  • Lead form abandonment rate
  • Leads per day/month
  • Content downloads / requests per month
  • Lead conversion rate

E-Commerce-Specific Conversion

• • Product page visits
  • Volume of add-to-carts
  • Volume of searches
  • Total orders
  • Site Conversion: % of Orders out of All Visits)
  • Product Conversion: (% of Orders out of Product Page Visits)
  • Cart Abandonment Rate: (% of Orders out of All Cart Visits)

Revenue

• • revenue per visit
  • revenue per order or average order value (AOV)
  • Overall revenue

SEO KPIs

• • Return on investment: If you’ve made SEO improvements (technology, time/effort), what’s the return in terms of leads, conversions, purchases or other metrics?
  • Ranking improvement: Improved position for keyword term.
  • Overall rank improvement for all monitored keywords (top 500 keywords, for example)
  • Top keywords / landing page destinations
  • Bounce rate on landing pages
  • Pages per visit
  • Total Traffic (from Google)

Content Marketing KPIs

Reach

• • Unique visitors
  • Geography (where your content is being read)
  • Mobile / device type: what devices are your customers using?

Engagement

• • Bounce rate
  • Time spent on site
  • Page views
  • Comments
  • Social sharing

Revenue/Lead Generation

• • Number of leads
  • Conversion rate
  • Revenue per visit
  • Total revenue

Social Media KPIs

Reach

• • Number of fans and followers
  • Demographics and location

Engagement

• • Number of active followers
  • Number of likes and shares
  • Comments
  • Mentions
  • Click-throughs
  • Conversions

Video KPIs

Brand Exposure

• • Views on video
  • Completion rate
  • Page traffic
  • Bounce rate
  • Shares/Social metrics
  • Repeat visitor rate

Conversions

• • CTRs to product or lead pages
  • Revenue lift
  • Total revenue

Email KPIs

• • Open rate
  • Click-through rate
  • Conversion rate
  • Unsubscribe rate
  • Traffic Spike: See if there was a surge in traffic (page/web site/target link) the day of and the day after you sent the email.

Goals

• • How many leads you received? Lead quality?
  • Total orders
  • Total sales
  • ROI?

Paid Search KPIs

• • Click-thru rate
  • Cost-per-acquisition
  • Impression share
  • Return on Investment (ROI)
  • Bounce rate
  • Pages per visit
  • Keyword traffic (The amount of traffic being generated by each respective keyword in your PPC campaign)

Overall

• • Overall traffic
  • Revenue Generated
  • Impression share

Display & Native Advertising KPIs

• • Brand recall: (Typically commissioning a brand study comparing the increase in awareness of the brand among people who have seen the ad vs. people who haven’t).
  • Click-thru rate
  • Direct web site traffic (from clicks)
  • Total conversions (lead, purchase etc.)
  • Cost per acquisition (if the point was lead generation / conversion or another measure)
  • ROI / Revenue contribution

Mobile KPIs

• • Total app downloads

  • Total reviews

  • Upfront purchases (if applicable)

  • Total 3-star and above reviews in app store

Usage metrics

• • Overall monthly users to total downloads
  • Time spent on the app
  • Total in-app purchases

Conclusion

We hope this has been helpful. If you need help setting up analytics and data tracking for any of your current systems or want to implement and manage a new marketing platform, we’re happy to help.  We work in all kinds of CMSs, marketing automation and email platforms, ad management, and social media platforms. Just contact us for a free consultation anytime.