Running a business can be overwhelming. As the owner or manager, you may be juggling many roles and responsibilities at once, including online marketing. So how do you stay focused on what’s important with your marketing strategy to ensure your business continues to grow and thrive month after month?
Choosing the right internet marketing key performance indicators (KPIs) allows you to get crucial insights into how your marketing strategy is working for your business – and most importantly, where you need to focus to get even better results.
Here, we – as a digital marketing company – take a look at how to choose the online marketing KPIs that will provide the best data and will be most important to your business.
KPIs In A Nutshell
You may be wondering what marketing KPIs are, so we should clear that up before looking at what marketing KPIs should matter most for your business. Marketing KPIs reflect the success of your marketing strategy and should come from a reliable source of information, such as a marketing analytics tool like Google Analytics.
How to Use KPIs
Before looking at the most important metrics your business should be focusing on, we need to consider how to use this data.
- Look at Rates Rather Than Raw Numbers – Seeing your page views, leads, and conversions climb is one of the satisfying things about looking at your analytics. But a solid increase in numbers could deceive you regarding the actual performance of your marketing, outsourced SEO services or no. It’s important to always look at the rate as a percentage of growth rather than raw numbers. This could reveal that even though your numbers have continued to climb, your rate of growth is actually weakening.
- Choose Consistent Time Periods– You can’t measure growth if you don’t compare specific windows of time. Both weekly and monthly KPIs are best to calculate, because if the time is too short you won’t collect enough information. Wait too long, though, and you’ll miss opportunities to improve your strategy.
- Use KPIs to Make Realistic Goals – Just like any other aspect of life, your business needs goals to succeed. If you know your current rate of growth and conversions, then you can create a more realistic and accurate goal to aspire to in the future too.
KPIs That Matter
Here are the metrics you should be watching to achieve your company’s online marketing goals.
Traffic Growth – Importantly, you want to know how many people are visiting your website, and the rate of traffic growth is more important than the numbers. You might also want to break it down by traffic source to see which avenues are performing best to bring traffic to your site.
Traffic-to-Lead Ratio – When it comes to internet marketing, you don’t just want more visitors – you want more conversions and leads as well. This is one of the most popular metrics that reveals how successful your site and marketing is at turning traffic into leads. Use other companies or competitors in your industry to compare and plan conversion rate optimization (CRO) strategies to improve your traffic-to-lead ratio.
Landing Page Conversion – Landing pages are one of the most successful tools in your conversion arsenal. If they’re not performing as they should, change their colors, CTA, content, interactive media and form length to improve traffic-to-lead ratio.
Social Media Traffic and Conversion – Looking at your social media traffic and conversion rates can allow you to see which strategies and social media platforms are bringing in the most qualified leads and turning them into customers.
Cost-per-Lead – Related, but different to customer acquisition costs (CAC), cost-per-lead indicated how much marketing spends on employee salary, content marketing tactics, targeted PPC ads, social media marketing, and corporate events for lead generation. You want a low cost-per-lead for your company’s financial health.
MQL-to-SQL ratio – MQL-to-SQL ratio measures how many marketing qualified leads (MQL) are accepted as sales qualified leads (SQL) and progress through the sales funnel.
Inbound Marketing Revenue and ROI – This KPI measures how much revenue Inbound Marketing has brought to your company, and the total return on investment of what you’ve spent on inbound marketing, vs. your returns in revenue.
Lifetime Value of Customer (LTV) – Although many claim it’s a sales KPI, by tracking LTV of an inbound customer, you can see how your inbound marketing is affecting your profitability.
By using these strategies and metrics to assess the performance of your marketing – whether or not you’re working with a digital marketing company – you can get the data and clarity you need to engineer your marketing strategy around ongoing growth and success for your company.