Have you ever tried to lose weight or run long distances without having some short-term goals to measure your long-term goal? That’d be very hard right? Like many other things that we do in life, our marketing campaigns need goals or indicators in order for us to reach success. In today’s digital world, so much content is being created and consumed that aren’t necessarily simple to manage. Whether it may be marketing campaigns within social media, email, websites, or even television, measuring your marketing campaign’s success has become essential in today’s business world.
Key performance indicators or KPIs are measurable metrics that reflect the overall effectiveness of your business’s marketing and sales campaigns. KPIs can be created and customized to the needs of your team. With these KPIs, you can determine what’s working and what’s not, in order to optimize it for the better. When creating these KPIs it’s important to consider the following:
1. Having a strong marketing campaign in place – The first step to measuring success is to ensure that you’re setting yourself up for success. Be sure to evaluate your campaign to make sure that it’s a well thought out campaign that can be measured with a metric. For example, if you’re running a Facebook campaign, ask yourself: are you targeting the right audience? Does your creative or call to actions match the demographic? Is Facebook the right platform to run this campaign? By ensuring that you’ve established a strong campaign is a great first step to success.
2. Identifying the results you want – This is your hypothesis and goal. Having an expected outcome will validate whether or not your campaign was successful. This can also help your team stay aligned.
3. How to Track Them – Monitoring your campaign is the key to success. When you’re creating your KPIs, it’s important to figure out how you can measure them. For example, when you’re looking for web traffic, do you have web analytics tools available? This is the time to start thinking like an analyst.
To help you get started, here are a few useful performance indicators that you can use to measure your marketing campaign:
Cost Per Lead
Cost per Lead or CPL is the performance indicator that shows you how cost-effective your marketing campaigns are at generating leads. It is a great tool to use to analyze whether or not your online advertising tools like Facebook or AdWords are as effective as you’d like them to be.
Conversion Rate
Conversion rates are a great indicator to see whether or not your assets are effective in driving your customers down the funnel. A conversion is when a user performs a desired action or reaches the desired point. In other words, it’s when a user responds to your call-to-action whether it may be to purchase or sign up for something. Measuring your conversion rate will show you which assets are converting. This is a great tool for A/B testing because you can try different ideas to see which resonates with your audience the best.
Mobile Traffic
In today’s world, everyone is on mobile. Using mobile traffic as an indicator can show you whether or not you’re focusing on the right device. It can tell you whether or not you need to make your content optimized for mobile. Also, with so many mobile users today, Google has begun to focus on prioritizing websites that are mobile friendly. Understanding which pages your users enjoy visiting on mobile can help improve your user experience drastically.
With these metrics and many others, you are on your way to executing a great marketing campaign.
