Your organization’s marketing team is in charge of multiple marketing efforts, but how can you ensure their time, energy, and your organization’s ad dollars are going toward the right campaigns?
Tracking the following marketing metrics (also known as key performance indicators, or KPIs) will help determine the effectiveness of your organization’s overall marketing strategy, areas where you need to realign your messaging, and where you can shift your budget to make the most digital impact.
Here are three marketing KPIs you should start tracking today.
1. Website Visitors
What to start tracking: How many users are visiting your website or your landing pages on a monthly, weekly, and daily basis? How long are visitors staying on-site? How are they getting there?
Why you should track these KPIs: Getting users to your website is important, but it's just as crucial to understand how they got there and what they do once they arrive.
Analyzing your website traffic through a website analytics software, like Google Analytics, can enable you to better understand how potential customers interact with your site. From determining your most profitable pages and learning what cities bring in the most qualified traffic to figuring out what keywords are pulling in users who are staying on-site for the longest amount of time, installing website analytics on your website is an essential first step in beginning to optimize your overall marketing strategy.
It won't take long to identify trends based on seasonality, as well as the effects of your digital and content marketing efforts.
2. Number of Qualified Sales Leads
What to start tracking: How many lead generator downloads are taking place from your digital marketing effort? How many leads turned into paying customers? Are you seeing any sales growth as a result of your campaigns?
Why you should track these KPIs: Before you begin to set up conversion tracking within your marketing campaigns, first take a step back and define exactly what a conversion means to your business. Is it a lead generator download? Is it someone filling out a form on your landing page? Is it a purchase from your website? Defining exactly what you want to consider as a conversion, or sales lead, will help you put the right tracking into play.
Conversion tracking can be placed through a variety of methods including setting up custom events and goals within Google Analytics or embedding a pixel on your website to gain further data from your social campaigns.
3. ROI vs. Amount Of Money Spent
What to start tracking: How much money are you spending on your marketing campaigns? How much money did you make off the leads and conversions from those campaigns? What is the cost per lead?
Why you should track these KPIs: From brand awareness and retargeting on Google to social media campaigns, it’s important to track how much ad spend you are investing in your marketing efforts across all platforms.
Not only will this help you stay on budget for the month and the year, but you can also gain insight into your ROI, or any profits or losses that came as a result of your campaigns.
If you have the right tracking and goals set up to identify the number of leads, you also have an opportunity to determine an associated value. For example, if the lifetime value of one user making a $20 purchase on your website is $1,500, you can set the value of a purchase at $1,500. This small step can yield big results by helping you identify your ROI of certain marketing campaigns, driving specific actions on your website.
To determine ROI, first, add up the amount of money you’ve made from your digital marketing leads and divide it by how much you’ve spent so far on your marketing campaigns.
If you’ve generated $550,000 as a result of your digital marketing campaigns that you spent only $75,500 on, your ROI would be 733%. This means that for every $1 you invested in digital marketing, you were able to generate $7 of profit for your business.
Tracking the KPIs listed above has the power to transform the way you look at digital marketing entirely. Not only will you be able to show ROI for your efforts, but knowing the ins and outs of your campaigns will likely help you conserve ad spend and reallocate it to the right place to bring in even more leads for your business.
