As a marketer, you see a number of different KPIs on a daily basis. You’ve got your advertising figures, web traffic numbers, social media engagements, CTRs and open rates. But are you able to take a step back to look at all these insights and make an informed decision on what you could do next to improve your customers’ journey? Do you know how to holistically assess if your marketing efforts are being steered in the right direction?
To determine the overall performance of your marketing activities it’s important to go back to the basics: your marketing campaigns are there to support your organisation’s objectives. Key metrics should, therefore, measure the progress towards these goals, rather than become siloed numbers. Offline or online, short-term or long-term, looking at the right set of KPIs is essential to better decision making. Here are the KPIs you need to focus on as priority:
- Website traffic to lead ratio
Understanding your website traffic is imperative, as once again you can track it back to the channels that help you drive users to your website. If your traffic is steady or increasing, but few leads are produced as a result, chances are your site is missing some information, or the UX side of it needs your attention. Remember that, just as with other KPIs, this metric does not give a lot of credible insights if it’s interpreted in isolation from other metrics.
- Landing page Conversion rate
Whether it’s filling in a form, signing up for a newsletter or even purchasing a product – landing pages are designed to convert visitors. They are the ultimate proof your content is resonating with your target audience. Campaign landing pages are also the perfect tool to test what works and what does not, e.g. Can the ‘download button’ be more obvious? Does the form need to be higher up? A/B testing these features can help you understand what factors improve conversion rates and create a more engaging experience for your customers.
- Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
Having many visitors and a broad reach is excellent, but transforming these potential customers into paying ones is often a challenging task. Customer acquisition costs are the costs spent to make this transformation happen. You need to keep an eye on CAC regularly, and make sure to filter it down to cost per acquisition for each channel – then invest in those channels that produce qualified leads. Don’t forget to also check what sort of ‘value’ these customers are creating over their lifetime. You might discount the more costly channels and instead spend more on social that is cheaper, but that won’t matter if the customers coming from social media channels are spending less with your business or are only likely to do a quick free trial and move on.
- Customer Lifetime Value (or churn rate)
CLV is simply the total worth of a customer to a business over the entirety of their relationship. It’s a particularly important metric, as it allows you to analyse which channels produce customers that bring the most revenue to the business. To calculate it, all you need to do is take customer revenue and minus the cost of acquisition and serving the customer.
- Marketing Return On Investment (ROI)
The holy grail of all the marketing KPIs. Marketing ROI shows how much revenue a marketing campaign has raised compared to its costs. ROI insights will enable you to make a proper assessment of the quality and success of your marketing campaigns, making it indispensable in your periodical reporting. It’s a difficult one for marketers to get their hands on, as fragmented data scattered around the department, and organisation as a whole, makes it difficult to generate a reliable ROI figure. Your best bet is to utilise a platform that provides all the data you need to determine your ROI in one single place.
Bringing it all together
Tying the KPIs to one another, as well as the broader business numbers, is the only way you can reliably assess, report on and predict marketing’s success. Your customer’s journey might be a long one or a relatively short one – either way, their experience needs to be optimised. Similarly, you need a reliable tool that connects together all the information from your different data sources so you can centre strategic decisions around real-time data and demonstrate marketing’s contribution to the bottom line.
To find out how to do that, check out our latest whitepaper: Your marketing ROI: Risk of Inaction vs Return on Investment’.