In this post, I will focus mainly on the KPIs related to SEO and social media, but I will also explain other examples of very common indicators. To end the post I will talk about the main tools to measure engagement in Social Networks, as well as some examples of tools to measure your KPI.
What is a KPI?
KPIs are indicators that help us measure and quantify our work, having previously defined objectives and activities that help us achieve those objectives.
KPIs have been used in the world of economics and finance for many years with a single objective to improve the efficiency and productivity of one or a set of services, thus ensuring that our work team functions as the “best music orchestra ”.
The acronym KPI comes from “Key Performance Indicators” and translated into Spanish would be key performance indicators.
KPI vs. Metrics: Do You Know The Differences?
Before getting into the key performance indicators, I would like to clarify the difference between KPI and metrics.
In online marketing, we can measure so many things that sometimes we do not know how to distinguish the relevant metrics of a business.
That is why it is essential that you know how to distinguish between both terms.
After all, the metrics are a unit of measure with which we can know what the evolution of a business is.
And this is where the fundamental difference comes from.
The KPIs will be the most important metrics with which we will measure the health status of a project.
Has it become clearer to you now what does KPI mean?
What Are The Most Important KPIs?
To make the above explanation clearer, let’s see an example.
Many people wonder what are the most important KPIs in marketing and really, the answer is simpler than it seems.
The most important KPIs are those that directly affect the achievement of marketing objectives.
That is, you must think about those metrics that directly affect your business.
Now, let’s see how to create KPI indicators.
I always like to start with marketing objectives and transform them into web objectives.
That is, as you see in the graph, my marketing objective is focused on positioning, and transferred to the objective of the web means that they find me on Google.
For this purpose, the examples of clearer performance indicators are organic visits and the number of keywords positioned on Google.
Once they have found me, my next objective will be to get the visibility that transformed the objective of the web will be that they know me.
In this case, the examples of marketing indicators that will tell us if we are reaching our visibility objective will be the new visits, the pages visited and the quality of those visits.
Is it clearer in this way how to create the KPIs?
What you will have to do once you have them established is to create a chart of reports with the main KPIs to see in a very simple way the evolution of your business.
KPIs Characteristics
When establishing KPIs you must always meet a series of conditions so that you can measure and compare over time in order to know the evolution of your business.
All key performance indicators must be:
Measurable. Although it seems obvious, a KPI must be measured.
Achievable. The objectives you set when choosing your KPIs have to be realistic and attainable in the period we have established.
There is nothing more frustrating than establishing unrealistic KPI indicators and then feeling that the objectives are not met.
Relevant. Choose only the most important indicators and discard those that the information they offer us is uninteresting or relevant.
Newspaper. The indicator should be able to be analyzed periodically (weekly, monthly, quarterly, etc.) depending on the periodicity that we have determined.
Specific. Choose only the most interesting part or aspect of the information collected.
KPI Examples in Marketing
The decision of how I choose the KPIs should proceed on those indicators that really affect your business or company, but to facilitate their creation, here is an extensive list of KPI examples that you can apply to both your SEO and social strategy:
Return on Investment (ROI)
We have to measure the revenue generated by our marketing campaign and compare them with the expense they entail.
Sales Increase
The objective is to demonstrate that our marketing campaign is affecting an increase in sales.
Traffic Sources
The objective is to measure and evaluate the different media or sources where we can get visits to our business website.
There are 4 types:
1. Direct traffic Are those users who visit us by typing the URL in the browser itself.
The more known and popular our brand on the Internet, the more direct traffic we can get.
2. Referral traffic Visits we receive through links on other websites.
This reference traffic can be classified into:
- Visitas que recibimos a través de los canales sociales.
- Mención. Visitas que recibimos por un enlace en un blog o sitio web similar que nos ha mencionado.
3. Organic traffic Users discover your website when they make a query on the main search engines (Google, Bing, and Yahoo).
To increase our organic traffic we need to carry out a good SEO Strategy, which helps us improve the visibility of our site in the main search engines.
4. Campaign traffic These visits come from ad campaigns that we can carry out in different media, although the best known are AdWords ads, Facebook ads, Twitter ads, and many more.
Sales Funnel
A very important aspect of inbound marketing, since understanding the process of how we get customers or sales is essential for us to optimize it.
This conversion funnel thoroughly analyzes the customer acquisition process, an aspect that helps us greatly to know how potential customers discover our product or brand.
The marketing funnel is usually divided into 5 stages: awareness, interest, consideration, preference, and purchase, and with that, we can know the conversion rates in each of the stages and extract what are our strengths and weaknesses that help us convert opportunities in sales
Success Rate Measurement
The objective is to measure the effectiveness of your actions that are helping you to achieve the objectives.
We will measure the number of people who complete a specific marketing objective such as subscribing to a mailing list and help us to know the conversion rate of users who reach the consideration stage.
Define specific marketing objectives, such as email subscription, ebook sales, or any action we are looking to get leads, and analyzes the total conversion and the conversion rate, which is nothing more than dividing the total visits by the number of reads achieved.
There are many factors that can change or change this conversion rate, but as a general rule, the conversion rate is usually between 4% or 5%, although from my experience I tell you that sometimes it can be higher reaching more than 10% of conversion.
What conversion rate do you get in your sales strategies?
Keyword Performance
We have to analyze the ranking that our keywords occupy to measure and understand the effectiveness of our SEO strategy, and especially with regard to the visitor traffic that it brings us.
In order to get leads we have to get thousands of visits to our landing page or website, but given the great algorithm changes and the volatility of the position of our rankings, it is important to pay special attention to:
1. List of keywords. We have to analyze the evolution of the keyword list that is capturing visitor traffic on Google.
You can use SEMrush to see the evolution of the last months of the keywords of your website that you have positioned on page 1 and 2 of Google.
2. Position of each of the keywords. We will analyze the position that each keyword occupies, as well as its evolution.
3. Increase CTR. We will analyze the CTR of our posts and pages since we have to increase the CTR as much as possible so that it will have a better SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
4. Reduce the bounce rate. The first impression does have to improve SEO because if the user is not attracted to what he sees or reads in a few seconds, it is very likely that he will leave our page and thus obtain a very high bounce rate.
To avoid this you have to pay special attention to the featured image and the content of the first paragraph since you have to impact and hook the user so that he is interested in what he is seeing.
5. Increase the average visit time. In order for visitors to stay on our website for many minutes, it is important that you follow the following tips:
- Apuesta por la calidad porque es el factor clave del SEO.
- Utiliza imágenes e infografías impactantes.
- Dota a tu contenido de lo mayor practicidad posible.
KPIs in Content Marketing
Unique Visitors
This KPI indicator in marketing provides us with a standard metric since we will be able to know how many people have visited your site or your content in a specific time interval.
Origin
Knowing our audience is very important so that we can focus more or less effort on a specific location.
With Google Analytics we can obtain information such as:
- Demographic data of our audience with data such as age and sex.
- Cities and countries that visit our page the most.
- You will be able to know which country or city the biggest ROI brings.
Visits From Mobile Devices
It is important to know how many users consult and read your content from mobile devices since this is important to know if our website has a good responsive design.
User Heat Map
I use 2 tools to analyze the heat map of the user to see in which sites they have more incidence; the first is CrazyEgg that allows us to create a heat map of our website, and the second is Sumome, which we can see a heat map where visitors click.
Rate and range of the final action
This KPI indicator measures the effectiveness of our marketing campaign, paying full attention to the last action taken by the user who visits us. These are some of the final actions that this KPI could collect:
1. Departure. Visitor who leaves our page.
2. Bounce. We will analyze the bounce rate.
3. Social. Visitors finish their visits on our social channels.
4. Contact. The visitor makes contact with us through any of the communication channels we have established.
5. Lead. We will collect the data of users interested in our product or service.
6. Buy. The number of visitors who become a customer and end their visit with a purchase or contracting of a service.
Cost Per Lead
This KPI measures the effectiveness of our marketing campaign. This is very important because we have to quantify the cost or expense of our actions to divide it into total leads, and we can know how much that cost per lead reaches.
This cost per click helps us calculate the return on investment or ROI.
This cost per lead can be calculated in 2 ways:
1. General. The cost per lead of our entire marketing strategy is established.
2. Specific. We analyze the cost per lead of an individual campaign (SEO, Adwords, banners, social media ads, etc.).
Email Marketing
The objective of this KPI indicator is to measure the effectiveness of our email marketing strategy.
We will analyze aspects such as:
- Open Rate
- Click-Through Rate
- Leads achieved.
- Purchases obtained.
We will also use this indicator to measure ROI.
Social KPIs
Since the arrival of social networks, they have given entry to a large number of KPI indicators that measure interactions and objectives in the social environment.
One of the best known Social Media KPIs is the one that measures the interaction, that is, it analyzes the effectiveness of our campaign based on the Engagement in Social Networks obtained.
Another social indicator is the growth of our communities of followers in the different social channels, although the idea is to link to the previous KPI so that we can analyze the quality of the followers based on their degree of social engagement.
In addition, when executing a social media strategy at a fundamental stage is the measurement of results.
But to be able to measure them correctly you must have previously defined the KPIs in more important social networks.
Otherwise, you will be wasting your time and money by not really knowing if your social media strategy is working or not.
So that this does not happen to you, in the following image you have a list with the most important metrics of the main social networks.
Now you don’t have any excuse to measure KPIs in social networks.
KPI examples for E-commerce, Adwords and Facebook Ads
The best way to know the health status of your e-commerce or online store is by creating a dashboard that includes your main KPIs.
To facilitate this task, in this image you will be able to different examples of KPI for e-commerce.
Also, normally, if you have an e-commerce you will carry out different advertising campaigns, and one of the channels you can use is Google Adwords.
I also indicate what are the main examples of KPI for Google Adwords.
Facebook Ads are “fashionable” to make online advertising campaigns is nothing new.
Virtually all companies are testing this type of advertising on Facebook, but are you really measuring well the results they are getting?
In the image, you also have several examples of KPI from Facebook Ads that will surely come in handy to analyze your ads campaign.
To me personally, a Facebook Ads metric in which I usually look a lot is in the ROAS that tells you for every €1 invested how many euros you recover.
Tools to Measure the Activity in Social Media Channels
Social Mention
Undoubtedly, Social Mention is one of the best free tools to analyze the mentions of any brand or business.
How Sociable
With How Sociable, you can have a first picture of how any brand or company is sociable.
Ubervu
You can access quantitative and qualitative metrics with Ubervu, and you can see all your social profiles from the same dashboard.
Crowdbooster
With this payment tool, Crowdbooster, you can analyze your engagement on Facebook and Twitter.
Ready
Ready is a tool with which you can analyze the engagement of your brand as well as that of your competition.
Audiense
You can access a complete analytical report of your brand on Twitter with Audiense, where you can see for example the interactions and which are the posts that have had the best engagement.
Other Tools to Measure KPIs in Marketing
KPI Watch Dog
KPIwatchdog is a monitoring tool that we can use to analyze up to 5 KPI indicators for free.
Simple KPI
Simple KPI is a payment tool with which you can analyze the KPIs of your marketing strategy and you can try 14 days for free.
Mix Panel
Mix Panel is a tool that you can use in its free version and that will help you to make your “first steps” analyzing your first KPI indicators.
Geckoboard
Geckoboard is one of the best tools to analyze KPIs indicators and carry all the analytics of a single dashboard.
The cheapest license for this tool will cost you $ 19 per month.
Google Analytics
The most used analytical tool in the world is Google Analytics. You can also use to set objectives and analyze ROI.
I hope this article is very useful for you to start defining your first KPI indicators and include them in your marketing strategy. I recommend that you introduce yourself little by little in each of the tools so that you can make the most of its full potential.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a basic tool where we can obtain very interesting data to complement our measurements.
What other KPI indicators do you use?
Do you think the measurement of KPIs in marketing is important?
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