KPIs To Measure Your Digital Marketing Strategy
Introduction
Digital Marketing isn’t all that you learn from textbooks. When you begin working at a digital marketing agency, you realize that a digital marketing strategy is a combination of plans and a short-term vision for multiple digital channels. Since the digital arena is ever-changing, and trends can tip off over-night, revising your strategy frequently gives you a chance to outshine your competition.
An effective way of reviewing any strategy is by measuring the actual results against the standards set in the beginning. Similarly, when you review your digital marketing strategy against the standards (or the expectations), you make constant changes to make the deviation even smaller. And somewhere, amidst those constant changes, you stumble upon the perfect strategy for a given period.
The process of measuring your actual against the standard is relatively simple. It requires you to consider the right set of KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and evaluate them every so often.
Now, generally, most digital marketing strategies have similar KPIs because they include similar targeted digital channels. Now that we can access the world through digital media, it is only fair to include them all in one bunch. But the real difference lies in prioritizing the digital channels as per your business.
Multiple Verticals & Numerous KPIs — Here Is The Right Combination!
According to 99Firms — 56% of millennials research a product or service on digital media before purchasing. And this is the right window for businesses to make that sale happen.
Any digital marketing agency includes, more or less, the following components to create a digital marketing strategy:
- SEO for visibility on SERPs
- Social Media Marketing
- PPC
- Content Marketing
- E-mail Marketing
Now, each of these components has a set of KPIs that reflect the success of the strategy, individually.
Remember: our goal is to minimize the deviation between actual and standard!
Naturally, each of these will have a different set of primary KPIs.
Why Different?
Because it’s unreal to consider the same KPIs for every component, you cannot consider revenue generation as the sole KPI for your content marketing campaign and your social media campaign.
Let’s read along to see the different KPIs for various channels
1) SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
SEO is as good as gambling, and the one thing that can truly track the performance of your SEO website is the RoI (Return on Investment) via revenue generation.
There are three primary purposes of any SEO campaign:
- Site Visits
- Conversion
- Revenue
And usually in the order that’s written.
An effective way to assess your campaign’s success is to map the revenue generated as a result of the previous two steps.
So, the bottom line is that from a combination of on-page and off-page SEO activities, you can generate a projected KPI.
Note: It is imperative to lodge down a plan and set-up a standard KPIs to ensure that you achieve them.
In the case of SEO campaigns, you can use this simple equation:
Income Generated — Cost Of Investment = Net Revenue
You can consider other metrics, such as CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost), that can help evaluate the cost against the revenue generated.
2) Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is the modern-day language of our niches. Its influence is very well imbibed in our lives that a small shift in the trends causes a stir in the purchase choices.
Precisely for this reason, it is imperative to host a social media presence to set and track relevant KPIs.
Now, truth be told, the number of social media followers can be misleading. In its prime, the number of followers indicated the goodwill of the company. But as the trick became known to the world, followers are merely a number.
The right way to assess the success of any of your social media campaigns (organic or paid) is by tracking the conversions. Conversions suggest the number of visitors that have traveled through the customer funnel and turned into customers.
A simple way of calculating the conversion rate is:
Conversion = (Conversion/Total Visitors)*100
Needless to say, the higher the percentage, the more efficient your strategy.
3) PPC (Pay Per Click)
Consider PPC to be a paid version of SEO that works much faster!
The difference between the two essentially lies in the amount of money you’re ready to spend and how quickly you want to reach out to the niches.
While SEO remains the popular choice, PPC has its own benefits. When it was newly introduced, PPC was the talk of the town for the longest time. But, now that our niches are aware of the mechanism, there might be a few who’d still go the SEO-way!
Since you’re investing a considerable amount in PPC, its KPI is also concerned with money spent per customer. It is called Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), and it assesses the amount spent to acquire each customer.
Here is how you calculate CAC:
CAC = (Total cost invested/ Number of customers acquired) = Cost per customer.
Let’s assume your total expenses are $20,000 and you’ve acquired 2000 customers within six months. Here is how you find out the cost per customer:
CAC = $20,000/2000 = $20 per customer.
Another KPI that can help is the click-through rate. The ads that you run on the SERPs reflect on the top of the pages to ensure maximum CTR. This is a very powerful metric that reflects how persuasive your ad is and how many users have clicked on your ad.
Here is how you calculate CTR:
CTR = (Click/Impressions)*100
4) Content Marketing
Content marketing is a potent tool when used correctly and within the right frame of time. It is a perishable platform and demands vigilance. There are multiple metrics to assess the effectiveness of your content marketing campaign. But let’s discuss the top three:
- Unique Visits: This doesn’t require any formula; just access your Google Analytics. It is a number that shows unique visitors to your page in a given time period.
- Bounce Rate: Bounce rate is the number of users that left your website either before navigating to another webpage or within a very short user session. You can access this metric as well from Google Analytics.
- Conversion: This is the number of users that have read your content and become your customer after following it. It is very similar to what we read in SEO.
5) E-mail Marketing
Believe it or not, E-mail marketing works!
Most business communication happens via e-mail and between Monday to Friday — this is the most active form of business communication.
But with evolving times, keeping your e-mail content evolved is essential to capture your targeted niches.
So, the best KPI to assess your e-mail marketing campaign’s effectiveness is obviously to track the analytics for the software. Mail Chimp is a trust-worthy e-mail marketing partner that provides you with all the information you need.
From that, we can access the following KPIs:
- CTR (Click-through rate)
- Conversion
- Open Rate
Tracking these KPIs can help you find any deviations and update your campaign.
Final Takeaway: Your Digital Marketing Strategy Must Be Updated Periodically!
The digital marketing arena is volatile and changes as soon as there is a dip or hike in any trends. As digital marketer or digital marketing agency, our job is to keep in touch with the market to identify the change and update the digital marketing strategy quickly.
While these KPIs aren’t the only ones to assess each component’s growth, they are generally used. There may be more or less KPIs depending on your strategy and your business’s nature (B2C, B2B, or others).
You can always get in touch with our Digital Marketing team for a consultation and get on board with our flexible packages. Our optimism and vigilance will ensure your growth!
Originally published at https://www.zealousweb.com.
