If 2020 taught us anything, it’s that digital communication, presence and reputation matters. Whether you’re a business leader looking to engage a new audience or a seller nurturing a new lead, it’s important to set, establish and maintain Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to gauge overall success. To help develop a strong benchmark for your business or brand in 2021, we’ve outlined the primary digital marketing KPIs to track. Below, they are broken down by category.
KPI Category #1: Social Media
“Social media platforms like Facebook are making it easier for consumers to go from discovery to purchase without ever having to leave the platform, creating a simple and seamless path to purchase,” explains CMO of Shapefish, Massimiliano Tirocchi. To take advantage of this shift into social communication and selling, you’ll want to drive a portion of your captured revenue or client pipeline via these platforms. Effective social media strategies start with the right digital marketing KPIs. These will allow you to refine and optimize your approach.
Depending on your company’s overall goals, you’ll need to measure:
- Reach: total number of unique accounts or visitors who were exposed to your content;
- Impressions: total number of times your content was displayed, regardless of interaction with the content;
- Engagement: represents the interactions with your post and can be broken down by comments, likes, shares and re-shares. Note that each of these interactions can carry different values based on the social platform and intended result of the social content;
- Conversions: often represented by link clicks, equates to the number of people who completed the intended result of the campaign (i.e., purchased a product, visited a website, DMed your page, etc.);
- Referral traffic: traffic directed to your website or digital company hub from your social platforms or content.
Also, prepare yourself to revisit and revise your social media KPIs based on emerging platforms or strategy adjustments. If nothing else, these digital communication tools are ever-changing. The brands that succeed in this space are agile, forward-thinking and foundationally built on a solid brand approach.
KPI Category #2: Digital Sales
Whether or not your sales team and approach are already rooted in digital-first selling, you need to build a strategy that accounts for a vast, online audience that’s actively looking for your product. The core of your digital sales KPIs should be focused on the performance of your website considering most relationships or transactions start here. Based on a website’s primary and secondary functions, your KPIs should reflect:
- Total sales revenue: the amount of direct revenue from website conversions;
- Total sales pipeline: the amount of potential pipeline captured from your website. This can include prospective clients or accounts, based on your specific sales cycle;
- Lead conversion: completed cycle of a lead from the nurture to purchase or contract phase;
- Bounce rate: the number of people who visited your site and left before taking action or engaging with content. This is often measured by tracking the time spent on the website. Reducing your bounce rate can require redefining bounce metrics in Google Analytics, optimizing site content, removing disruptive features or improving overall site performance;
- Total cost per lead: the average dollar amount spent to procure a lead. This can include paid promotions, marketing campaigns or targeted media.
Your digital sales metrics are often a strong indicator of overall digital health. Are consumers visiting your website? If they do, are they finding relevant content in a seamless user experience to drive action? Some of these metrics will often overlap with additional search engine optimization (SEO) metrics. This is intended to measure your content against intended audience engagement.
KPI Category #3: Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO, in internal and external practice, is a critical element of any comprehensive digital marketing strategy. KPIs for your SEO-focused campaigns and content should center on your messaging and channels’ efficacy. Eventually, this will help you better determine what message will resonate with your consumers (and how to get ahead of your competitors).
In addition to the foundational SEO metrics like organic traffic, keyword ranking, average time on page, scroll depth and page load time, we recommend you measure:
- Website authority: a score on a scale of 1 – 100, benchmarking your strength against other domains on the internet;
- Backlink traffic: the number of visits from landing pages or blog posts with backlinks to your website. It’s also essential to keep a pulse on the number of backlinks in rotation, lost backlinks and opportunities for content collaboration;
- Crawl errors: represents the ease at which search engines can find, identify and serve your content to consumers;
- Keyword market share: the dominance of your organization against competitors with high-value and high-conversion keywords;
- Conversion rate: the amount of conversions from SEO-optimized digital content.
Optimize Your Goals for Growth with Digital Marketing KPIs
The goals and metrics you set should challenge your marketing and sales teams to work in greater collaboration to build a digital engine for consumer/client engagement and acquisition. As you develop your digital marketing KPIs, leverage data from your specific industry to set reasonable standards for your team. Don’t expect to hit them all overnight. Additionally, plan to adjust them over time to help achieve your company’s goals.
At 10x digital, we converge all of our client’s meaningful metrics, performance and KPIs into a customized data dashboard. This can then show analytics, trends and goal completion (in real-time) to assess overall ROI. Learn more here or contact us for a free demo.