From the very beginning of the modern marketing era, one constant factor in advertising and a marketer’s broader efforts to connect with consumers was the inability to know, with any degree of certainty, the real impact the efforts had on a company’s success. Today, we are able to measure and analyze the performance of promotional efforts in great detail and generate seemingly magical discoveries of consumer identities and behaviors. Marketing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) allow a business to accurately measure the gravitation toward a strategic marketing objective. Focusing on the right metrics and choosing the most suitable marketing KPIs for your business is essential for a strategy to succeed. Knowing which metrics to focus on is key to gaining insights that can help understand effectiveness.
Marketing metrics are critical if marketers are to develop a meaningful understanding of how marketing activities work. Metrics are sets of data that monitor a brand’s campaigns and consumer conversations to determine how effective the messaging and channels perform. Metrics can indicate the most effective direction campaigns should proceed in, saving valuable marketing spend and optimizing marketing strategies’ overall efforts. All metrics are vital to understanding the performance and value of any marketing campaign, but not all metrics are important to all marketing strategies.
A KPI is a value that is aligned with specific business long-term objectives and mission. A selected number of core performance metrics that include those that are relative to a campaign’s objectives will generate a manageable and meaningful set of results. Selecting too many indicators can result in inefficiency. Only the metrics that support long-term business objectives should be considered. Not all metrics are valuable across all industries and business models. Successful digital marketing attribution models focus on the metrics that are most relevant to particular KPIs.
Monitoring impressions are common and a way to gain revealing measurement that indicates how display ads, social media posts, video views, and other marketing content perform. Any encounter with a brand’s impressions exposes potential consumers to a brand, its identity and its unique value proposition. One metric that is particularly revealing is Clicks, the number of times a social media user clicks on a brand’s organic message. Generally, the message with the most clicks will be an indication of the most successful advertisement. However, clicks are only a telling metric if it achieves a brand’s long-term objective or designated KPI. Measuring cost per click will help deliver a brand’s cost per customer acquisition which will help determine the effectiveness of a campaign’s level of spending relevant to revenue.
Most companies look at the amount of traffic websites generate, but total traffic counts fail to reveal a complete story. A Click-through rate (CTR) is beneficial for measuring email, digital ads, and short messages (SMS) which are designed to increase audience engagement. An open rate (OR) will deliver important statistics about the success of emails and personalized social media content and identifies how many targeted candidates actually open a message.
Perhaps the most important metric is the conversion rate. It identifies the percentage of potential consumers that were exposed to a brand’s marketing and gravitated through the levels of the sales funnel to make a purchase.
Performing any effort successfully requires the selection of the right tool for a specific job. Google Analytics, Hubspot, Google Adwords, Hootsuite Impact and Google Search Console are leading tools that can make selecting the right metric to reveal the best information about a marketing effort and ensure that the metrics a marketer tracks align with the brand’s KPIs.
Paul W. Farris, author of Marketing Metrics: The Definitive Guide to Measuring Marketing Performance says, “few managers appreciate the range of metrics by which they can evaluate marketing strategies and dynamics. Fewer still understand the pros, cons, and nuances of each.” Still a bit uncertain about how to measure the performance of a digital marketing campaign?
Junction Creative Solutions (Junction) is a results-driven agency that leverages digital technology to execute smart, purpose-driven marketing campaigns to drive qualified traffic and leads from the first customer touchpoint to the last. Call 678-932-0532 today to learn more.