A Few Essential KPIs in Digital Marketing
The ability to measure our actions on a detailed level is one of the greatest advantages of online marketing when compared to traditional marketing. We cannot analyze data effectively if we have made mistakes in the previous step, measuring our actions. A good measurement is key to predict the consumers’ behavior as we check if our actions are having the desired effect.
Let’s take a look at an example: Imagine that your company invests a certain amount of money in an online marketing action in order to increase sales, for instance, of an online store, and once it gets started, they realize something is not working quite right, but they don’t really know what it is. How to reverse this situation? Where is the flaw? What can be optimized? Here is where we introduce the concept of KPI.
What is a KPI in digital marketing?
The acronym stands for Key Performance Indicator, which is simply a measurement element that offers quantitative information that is real and interesting about some aspect of our work. We won’t use the same performance indicators in a Facebook ad campaign, say, to analyze the results of capturing leads or the status of an online store.
In digital marketing, everything can be measured. It’s important to define an appropriate strategy for each occasion, and it’s equally important to figure out the way to measure its repercussions. The key is in using the KPIs that are most adequate for each action, because if we choose an adequate strategy but we make mistakes in the way we measure it, we won’t be able to quantify the value of our actions.
We could create a huge list with all the KPIs that exist for each field of digital marketing, but it would be a very long task. In order to simplify and go deeper into each one of them, we can divide these into three categories as follows:
1. Traffic KPIs
Regardless of the goals that you want to achieve with your online strategy, measuring and analyzing the evolution of traffic of your website from different indicators is vital to optimize your strategies, and focus them towards attracting customers and guiding them towards what we consider a conversion in our blog or website.
New visitors and recurring visitors
It’s an important traffic KPI because we should be interested in how many new people have visited us in the given time period that we’re trying to measure. It doesn’t matter if the goal of the website is generating visibility to a personal brand or if we manage an eCommerce business, we should consider this metric in order to analyze our online visibility.
It’s very useful to compare this metric with the number of recurring visitors, because it will be a good indication of important aspects such as loyalty or our capacity of reaching a new audience.
Bounce rate
It’s the metric that tells us the percentage of visitors that come to our website and abandon it without interacting with any element of it. Knowing our bounce rate gives us a lot of information because it’s a good way of measuring user satisfaction, even though it can lead us to confusion if we don’t compare the data with other metrics such as the average permanence.
Permanence time
This metric is essential due to the amount of information it can give you. A low average permanence time combined with a high bounce rate tells us that the reader comes to our site and abandons it a few seconds later because he or she didn’t find what they were looking for. A high bounce rate combined with an also high permanence can be interpreted differently because the reader may have found what they were looking for.
2. Ecommerce KPIs
These are important indicators for those who have an eCommerce site and manage an online store.
Percentages of abandonment in different parts of the store
Do you know what are the pages of your online store in which most of your users abandon it? Is it when they realize that they have to sign up? Is it on the page where the shipping costs are listed? If we analyze which are the pages in which customers leave, we will be able to optimize them in order to try and keep them from leaving, and guiding our customers to complete the conversion.
Shopping cart abandon rate
It’s a very important indicator for these businesses because it shows the percentage of users who abandon the shopping process once they’ve started it. A high abandonment rate can mean that there are problems when it comes to the usability of the website, in the navigation, or that the customer is not being treated with enough trust.
Relationships between products
It’s related to techniques such as cross-selling, based in offering the customer products that are related to his or her purchase. We can use a KPI that tells us the amount of times that a user adds related products to his or her shopping cart, to analyze if we are adequately linking our products together.
3. KPIs in social media marketing
Social media tools are essential within digital marketing strategies, so measuring them is equally or even more important. A good measurement and later analysis are fundamental to evaluate the status of our social media strategy and the efficacy of the performance of the company’s Community Manager.
Interaction indicators
These are the ones that allow us to measure the engagement. We’re talking about the users who interact with us on Facebook, Twitter comments, likes or dislikes in YouTube videos, blog comments and so on.
Influence indicators
Metrics to quantify the impact of our actions. This could be the amount of shares of a post on Facebook, the retweets on Twitter, the times that a video has been shared on YouTube, and so on.
Popularity indicators
These allow us to know the tendency of growth and the size of our community. We are referring to Facebook likes, Twitter followers, blog subscribers and so on.
