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any of today’s marketers are taking advantage of
sophisticated tracking resources to re-examine
the way they measure campaigns, refine their
efforts … and ultimately realize greater results.
One such key performance indicator is ROI or return on
investment, which measures the benefit derived from a media
buy or marketing effort divided by the cost of that activity.
Diving deeper let’s examine how key performance indicators
(KPIs) are applied by channel:
Measuring Your
Marketing Campaigns:
Key Performance
Indicators by Channel
Content Marketing
| For blogs, e-newsletters, webinars and
other content marketing, employ KPIs to establish “benchmarks”
to gauge the success of your ongoing efforts:
•
Unique visits
measure how many people are viewing your
information.
•
Time spent
indicates how much readers value your
information.
•
Page views
let you know when people drop off, and how
many return for additional reference.
•
Conversion rate
is the “bottom line” KPI, indicating the
percentage of people who engage in your target action, such
as downloading a white paper, requesting more information,
registering for an event or making a donation.
Digital Advertising
| Return on investment for paid search
advertising is often referred to as return on ad spend. A ROAS
of $4:1, for example, means that for each dollar you spend on
pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, you realize four dollars in revenue.
With this KPI, you can compare media for efficiency. In addition,
you can use this KPI as a benchmark to fine-tune keywords,
advertising text and offers as well as the landing page to which
you direct your PPC prospects.
@
Website
| Of the many KPIs for your website, you can start by
monitoring these:
•
Total visits
tracks overall traffic over time.
•
New vs. returning visitors
helps you determine the “stickiness”
of your site. (i.e. Are they coming back for more?)
•
Bounce rate
measures the number of people who enter your
site and leave without viewing other pages.
•
Incoming links
tell you the other websites that are linking to
yours, important if they are quality sites for your search engine
optimization.
Email Marketing
| For most marketers, the primary KPI is
open
rate
which measures the relevance of your email’s subject line.
Others to watch:
•
Click-through rate
is the percentage of readers who clicked on
the links within your email to land on your website, blog or other
desired destination.
•
Unsubscribe rate
. If it’s trending upward, examine your
messaging for relevancy and your delivery frequency. Are you
deluging your opt-ins with too many emails?
Social Media
| Marketing efforts on Facebook, Twitter and other
social media are often measured by
likes
,
comments
,
followers
,
retweets
and
shares
. To better assess the relative worth of one
channel versus another, you may also wish to monitor KPIs such as:
•
Website visits via social referral
and
conversions
assisted by
channel. If, for example, Twitter consistently outperforms Pinterest,
you may wish to allocate more of your social media marketing
budget to the former.
Key Takeaway:
With the wealth of KPIs available today through Google Analytics, HootSuite, Sprout Social and other resources, it’s
easier than ever to go beyond the click, “like” or response rate to better assess your current marketing efforts … and more profitably
guide your future activities. Let us know if you need help sorting it all out.
