Digital Marketing Strategy Success: Identifying the Right KPIs
Anyone can slap together a digital marketing strategy. However, that doesn’t mean that it will be a success. In truth, determining whether your strategy is successful or not can be pretty challenging. Are your efforts driving that spike in traffic, or was it something else? What’s driving customers to that particular page of your website? Is your ad copy that effective?
Determining the effectiveness of any digital marketing strategy can be easier said than done. Thankfully, you can use specific metrics to help you determine what’s what and whether you need to make changes to your strategy. These metrics are called KPIs, or key performance indicators. Of course, there are lots of potential KPIs, and not all of them may apply to your business. In this brief guide, we’ll walk you through some of the most important KPIs you should consider. These include both simple, easy-to-measure indicators, as well as those that require more out of the box thinking.
Simple KPIs
CPA – CPA stands for cost per action, and this applies to actions taken by a consumer that go beyond making an immediate purchase. Examples of actions taken can include signing up for an email list, filling out a particular form, or requesting more information.
CPC – CPC stands for cost per click. This is what you pay for every click on a paid ad. You can use it to determine which platform offers the right return on your investment. Platforms include options such as Facebook Ads and Google AdWords, although there are numerous others.
CTR – CTR stands for click-through ratio, and it’s a measure of how many people click through on a particular link. It’s often used with paid ads, but can be used with any link. It should be used to determine the effectiveness of copy driving the clicks.
Acquired Leads – Each month, you should vet the number and quality of acquired leads. This helps you determine if you’re attracting the right audience. It’s not so much about numbers, although that’s important too. Quality trumps quantity if all other things are equal.
Conversion Rate – One of the more important KPIs, conversion rate tells you how many of your website visitors convert into customers.
Complex KPIs
Origination of Visitors – One of the more difficult KPIs to measure is how many of your customers stem from your digital marketing efforts, versus those who arrive at your site through other means. You’ll need to know precisely how many customers were generated by each digital marketing tactic (Facebook Ads, AdWords ads, etc.) and then compare that number with the total number of customers for the same period.
ROI – ROI, or return on investment, is difficult to measure, because it means different things to different people. For some, the cash value is the only real ROI. For others, market share increases, thought leadership, customer opinion, and other factors matter as much or more than pure profit.
COC – Sometimes called CAC, COC stands for the cost of acquisition and tells you exactly how much it costs you to acquire a new customer. This will be significantly more than the cost of retaining an existing customer. To figure it out, you need to divide the total amount you’ve invested in digital marketing for a month by the number of customers acquired during that time.
Conclusion
Ultimately, these are just a few of the KPIs that you need to be tracking to determine whether or not your digital marketing strategy is doing what it should be doing. Others include lifetime customer value, churn rate, existing customer retention, retargeting success, and more. If you find it challenging to keep up with all of these metrics while also running a successful business, we can help. Contact us today.
