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How to Measure Success by Discipline

KPIs, or Key Performance Indicators, have been described as the backbone of business. We’ve put together a summary of important KPIs to consider in setting goals and measuring success.

By Davidson Belluso

OUR BLOG

How to Measure Success by Discipline

KPIs, or Key Performance Indicators, have been described as the backbone of business. We’ve put together a summary of important KPIs to consider in setting goals and measuring success.

By Davidson Belluso

KPIs, or Key Performance Indicators, have been described as the backbone of business. These metrics offer businesses a way to evaluate progress toward their performance goals. Deciding which metrics should be used as KPIs requires you to determine what factors are driving your business and assess their performance.

When it comes to setting KPIs for a campaign, there is typically an overall goal for the campaign; what you want to accomplish through the combined marketing efforts – increased sales by five percent, sign five new accounts, etc., – in addition to each marketing component having its own unique KPI or measuring tool.

To better identify what performance indicators should be established for each, as well as how to measure their success, we’ve put together a summary of common KPIs per marketing discipline to consider in your approach to setting goals for your campaign.

Set Defined Campaign Goals

First, and most importantly, establish written goals for the campaign. Having a clear set of goals is key to understanding what is to be achieved and then measuring it.

Goals need to be measurable and answer the questions of who, what, how much and by when. They need to be defined as quantitatively as possible.

Some questions to ask yourself when setting your campaign goals are:

  • Reach – Who is your target audience – the group of people you want to reach – and what is your message?
  • Awareness – What should the target audience see, hear, or read that they haven’t before?
  • Attitude – What should the target audience believe?
  • Behavior – What should the target audience do?

How to Measure the Impact of Your Campaign

Once you have established your goals, you are ready to quantify and measure the effectiveness and impact of your campaign.

Depending on the discipline, you will want to track specific metrics. The following are some of the most common indicators where you will want to focus.

Digital Advertising

  1. Leads – This metric indicates the number of new leads acquired since the start of the campaign. Depending on the final call-to-action (CTA) that you want your audiences to complete, a new lead can be someone signing up for a free trial, creating an account on your site, or submitting a contact form.
  2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – This is a measure of all organic traffic from search engines and is one of the most profitable digital channels for marketers. SEO metrics focus mainly on organic traffic and acquiring highly targeted leads.
  3. Click-through Rate (CTR) – With Paid Search, or PPC, CTR is the percentage of online audiences who clicked on one or more of your links, banners, or search results. The CTR is a very important metric for all online marketing as it gives you direct insight into how effectively your digital marketing is catching the eye of your audiences and how many people are engaging with your content.

Website

  1. Website Traffic – Google segments traffic into eight channels which allow you to identify specific patterns of behavior for each source, such as Organic Search, Referral, Direct, Social, Paid Search, Email and Display.
  2. Percentage of New Sessions – Total number of visits to your website, how many were returning and how many were new. This metric helps to determine if a website is attracting new visitors and whether your website offers enough value to warrant return visits.
  3. Conversion Goals – Think of conversion goals as business objectives: email signups, contact form submissions, content downloads, watching a video, purchasing an item, etc. This metric helps to identify whether users are getting to the pages you want them to.

Social Media

  1. Impressions – The number of times your content was displayed throughout a social channel, no matter if it was clicked or not.
  2. Reach – This indicates how far your message is actually traveling and how many eyes it’s getting in front of. It is important to note, that reach and impressions can be misleading statistics at times, as it only shows how many people your post was served to. Unlike engagement, which has definitive answers such as x amount of likes, reach is really just an estimate.
  3. Engagement – Simply put, engagement measures the number of likes, shares, and comments that your social posts receive. Having a large reach with low engagement is a bad sign because it shows that you don’t have a marketing message, or content, that resonates with your audiences. Reaching millions of people means nothing if they aren’t interested in what you have to offer.

For insights on how to create content that will drive these metrics, check out our blog on Social Media Content Types.

Public Relations

  1. Press Mentions – Track the number of press mentions for your company or products and services.
  2. Earned Media Impressions – Use AVE (Advertising Value Equivalency) to determine what your editorial coverage would cost if it were advertising space.

As you build out and implement your marketing efforts, aim to identify, and set discipline-specific performance indicators. These will be the criteria on which you will monitor and report on the overall-campaign results and successes.

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