Examples Of KPIs
Let’s look at some examples of KPIs that might be used by Marketing,
The digital marketing strategy is very important for a contemporary marketing department and will include a number of activities, such as website presence, social media, email marketing, and lead generation.
The website and its effectiveness are a good place to start for the operational team in this department. Some websites are transactional, others offer information to visitors, allowing them to contact customer services for example.
Campaigns may include a “call to action” on the website – to purchase, make an application, read about an offer, ask for information or contact the company to place an order.
A good measure or metric is your website visitors and their activity.
You might collect data and analyse; –
- How many visitors per day, week, month
- Percentage increase or decrease on previous period
- The number of returning visitors
- Their activity – average pages visited, their time on the site
- Percentage increase or decrease on previous period
This might be reviewed weekly by the operational team, in an attempt to understand the effectiveness of a marketing campaign, or of the content marketing strategy. The pages visited will help to check if the content the site offers matches what the customers are looking for. The percentage movement against previous periods will tell you about the effectiveness of new content or campaigns
Note that the metric is a measure. The effectiveness of the KPI is in trying to analyse and understand what that metric is telling you about your marketing activities and their effectiveness.
First visit
You can also capture and analyse data relating to first visits to the site. This will tell you how visitors are finding the site, whether it is by searching, or from social media for example. You can see how long the visitors spend on the site, again measure their number of pages visited, which pages, and the time on the site.
Correlating this information to the traffic source shows the marketing team the quality of visitors coming from each traffic source, as well as the volume of traffic from each source.
Cost per Lead
Imagine you are running a per click campaign and want to track the cost per lead.
Your company spent £1400 on your pay-per-click (PPC) campaign and 70 users convert to leads
Cost per lead = £1400/70 is £20.
This can be compared with previous campaigns, or perhaps against a benchmark the company has established for lead generation, to measure the effectiveness of this particular PPC campaign for lead generation.
Return on a Marketing campaign.
The Marketing Manager is likely to want to track the return on a Marketing campaign. If you launch a new product backed by a new campaign, this would measure how much revenue the marketing campaign is generating, against the cost of running that campaign.
Similarly, if there is a new campaign on an existing product, you can check the increase in sales against the expected sales without the campaign. Admittedly this involves some estimated figures (estimated sales without the campaign) and there are other complications to measuring returns on investment, such as the difficulty of isolating the factors affecting the product other than the campaign itself.
Nevertheless, it is important to measure as effectively as possible and analyse the findings. The KPI is an effective way to communicate that information to all interested parties.
Head of Marketing
The Head of Marketing will want more of an overview -how much of the marketing budget is spent, how does that compare to this time last year, what sales has it generated, how does that compare to last year? From these and other facts, they can deduce whether this year’s budget is being spent more or less effectively than last years.