[Updated 13/05/20]
Most businesses who use digital marketing are no stranger to using digital KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) to measure the results of their marketing. However, it’s one thing to review the numbers and another to interpret them into actionable improvements that will generate results in the future.
Looking to the Future
Being able to discern the impacts of your marketing activity is more important than ever for businesses.
The implications of COVID19 mean many businesses are looking to cut costs where they can. In order to make these critical decisions, you need as much insight into what value various areas of your business strategy are returning.
Marketing is a necessity for any business that wants to effectively reach their target and engage with them in a way that will convert them into paying customers.
But what if one are of low cost marketing is pulling in leads while a more costly product is little to produce results? You either need to find something else or fix whatever isn’t working. However, to know what is and isn’t working in your marketing strategy, you need to know what users are seeing and interacting with.
Read through this article if you want to know what digital KPIs you should be using and how to interpret the results from your digital KPIs to improve your overall digital marketing.
What Digital KPIs should you use?
There are different areas you can measure engagement rates, but for a good overview, you may want to consider measuring some of the following:
- Stickiness of your website- Can prospects find you through the search engines and how much time do they spend branding your site?
- Engagement- How many people liked, commented & shared your articles/posts/blogs.
- Email open and click-through rates- Are your prospects receiving quality emails they want to engage with?
- Most viewed pages on your website- You will need special software to determine this.
- Number of Downloads- Have you created a document with in-depth information about your business that people are downloading?
- Live chat conversions- This one is becoming increasingly popular among businesses.
- Review ratings and positive referrals- The reviews your business receives can have a dramatic impact on sales.
- Goal conversions- What number of people clicked on your paid advertising and resulted in a sale?
While this is a good example of the range of digital KPIs you could use, it would be difficult to cover all the available options. However, it’s essential to bear in mind that every aspect of your digital marketing is interlinked, so your strongest link is only as secure as your weakest. You can find more information on essential KPIs and metrics for driving sales online by clicking here.
Social Media
Social media is an essential aspect of most successful businesses marketing strategy. It’s how you cast the net and build brand awareness and trust. If done well, your social media should lead to conversions (as long as your other digital marketing components work well, e.g. a company website with exceptional UX).
Measuring digital KPIs through tools such as Dasheroo will help you understand how your content is being received, and the level of engagement that different types of content created. Seeing the ratio of reach to engagement allows you to gain an understanding of how impactful your social media platforms are.
For example, if you’re receiving low engagement but have a small reach, your posts are creating a relatively high engagement compared to a social account with a big reach but aren’t receiving much engagement.
Reviewing the engagement your posts are generating allows you to understand the type of content that performs well and the content that isn’t generating results. Based on that you can alter and adapt your social media strategy to include content that you know will receive good engagement.
Be aware that the content you publish on social media is affected by social media algorithms, which could result in your content losing reach. To read more about the impact of algorithms, click here.
Website
If you are seeing great results from your digital KPIs for your social media marketing, it should also translate into positive results for your website. If your social media KPIs don’t reflect your websites, you know something isn’t right.
For example, if your KPIs indicate the stickiness of your website is low, you could create more content with SEO so people can find your website. You could also focus on improving the user experience (UX)- this could be something simple such as speeding up the load-time, installing a live chat, or featuring video- so visitors stay for longer.
While email is now seen as one of the more archaic forms of digital marketing, it is still an effective way of nurturing your contact list and motivating them to invest in your product and service.
However, nearly 105 billion emails are sent every day, so you need to create emails that not only have high-quality content inside but also have titles that are going to generate good open rates.
If your digital KPIs indicate no one is clicking on the emails, you need to give your emails more engaging titles. If your emails get good open rates but are not receiving click-throughs, you need to take a new approach to the content and ask yourself what your prospects will see as content worth clicking on.
Are Digital KPIs results objective?
Remember to try to remain as objective as possible when analysing your KPIs. If you have spent a lot of time on your digital marketing and the KPIs don’t reflect the results you wanted, it can be challenging to see where you have gone wrong because you’re too close to it. Sometimes, getting an outside perspective on your KPIs can shine light issues that you can’t see.
To keep your KPIs objective, use a third-party platform like Dasheroo or SEMrush. You can find analytics on platforms like Facebook, but these are subjective, as the platform wants to show your results in the best light so you keep using the platform for marketing.
Interpreting the results
When interpreting the results from your digital KPIs, you need to do so on two levels; micro and macro.
A holistic macro-analysis allows you to see how your marketing is working cohesively overall. Healthy KPI results should show steady growth in engagement, website visits, conversions, and so-on.
A microanalysis allows you to see what’s going more intricately. If there’s something small that has changed and it’s stifling your growth, you should be able to quickly identify and rectify the issue.
A microanalysis of your KPIs can also identify positive results that a macro analysis might not. For example, if your monthly email marketing gets a 1% click-through, a macro analysis will see it as a bad thing. However, a micro analysis might find that everyone belonging to that 1% are turned into conversions, providing a sustainable and steady stream of business.
Conclusion
There are many different digital KPIs that can measure the impact of your marketing efforts. However, even if you use as many KPIs as possible, you need to maintain agility so you can quickly rectify marketing mistakes and can adapt to unexpected results.
If you’d like more information on how you can use KPIs and how to react to them, KUB is here to help. Get in touch to see how you could be growing your business by innovating your digital marketing strategy.
