The 7 Essential Marketing KPIs Every Brand Needs to Know and Monitor
Marketing KPIs are the key to a strong marketing strategy. They help you measure the success of your campaigns and also show you which marketing campaigns are likely to produce the best results in the future.
If you don’t have a system for tracking marketing KPIs, you might be failing to get the highest return on your marketing efforts.
To make sure that you are launching the most effective marketing campaigns, use the rest of this guide to learn how to determine which essential marketing KPIs to monitor and how to measure them.
What Is a Marketing KPI?
A marketing KPI (key performance indicator) is a piece of data that tracks changes in metrics related to your marketing efforts. They measure the progress and success of a campaign or marketing tactic, and they help you gauge whether or not you reached set marketing goals.
When you set and track the right marketing KPIs, you are able to see:
- Which parts of your marketing efforts are working
- Which parts of your marketing efforts are NOT working
- And what changes you should make to improve the performance of your strategies
While there are dozens of marketing KPIs, let’s start with a list of the seven most important marketing metrics to keep an eye on.
The 7 Essential Marketing KPIs You Must Know
If you want to run a successful marketing strategy, you must know and monitor the following KPIs on both ongoing efforts and one-time campaigns.
#1) Impressions
Impressions are the number of times that your audience sees one of your marketing messages. Impressions most often refer to the number of times someone views a paid ad (like a pay-per-click search ad or a Facebook ad), but you can think about impressions in other ways.
For example, a different type of “impression” might be:
- Pageviews
- Social post views
- Video views
- Opened emails
Each of these metrics represents the number of times that your marketing message got in front of an audience, and they can be used to determine conversion rates. So as you set up marketing campaigns, consider which metric will help you track the number of times an audience saw your message or call-to-action.
#2) Conversions
A conversion is when your audience completes an action that you want them to take. The audience is usually directed to take action through a CTA or call-to-action in a marketing message.
You can tie a conversion to any action that you want your target audience to take. For example, a conversion could happen when a customer signs up to download an ebook on your website.
As you set up your marketing strategies, track the conversions for each action you set out for your audience. Other examples of conversions might be when someone:
- Clicks on an ad (click-through rate)
- Buys a product from a landing page
- Signs up for a newsletter
- Shares or comments on a post
#3) Conversion Rate
The conversion rate is the percentage of people who see your call-to-action and take action. You can find this number by taking the number of people who took action and dividing it by the number of impressions (or people who saw your CTA).
For example, if 1,000 people landed on your landing page to download an ebook and 100 downloaded it, the conversion rate would be 10%.
It’s important to measure your conversion rates so you can see how well your CTA or campaign is performing. When you know your conversion rate, you can compare it to industry averages or benchmarks. You can also compare it to conversion rates on similar campaigns with different elements (such as a different ebook title or cover photo) to see which performs the best.
#4) Cost Per Conversion
A cost per conversion is relevant if you spend money on driving people to see your call-to-action. It reflects how much it cost to drive the conversion.
For example, if you spent $100 on digital ads to drive traffic to the landing page for your ebook download (that was downloaded 100 times), you could determine that the cost per conversion is $1. You divide the cost by the number of conversions (or downloads).
#5) Cost Per Lead (CPL)
A lead is someone who shows interest in working with your business. Leads can be classified in a variety of ways, but they are often people who provide their contact information to a brand. For example, the person who signs up for a brand’s ebook could be considered a lead.
The cost per lead is the amount of money a brand spent to acquire the lead. This can be similar to a cost per conversion if the conversion is a lead. In the landing page example, the cost per conversion is the cost per lead because the conversion was generating a lead.
Recommended Reading: Restaurants Need To Focus More on Lead Generation. Here's How.
#6) Cost Per Customer Acquisition
Cost per customer acquisition takes the cost per lead up a notch. Instead of measuring the cost of getting an interested prospect, it measures the cost of getting a new customer.
It measures the amount of money it took to turn a prospect into a customer. This process usually takes a bit more math as you may need to measure costs across multiple marketing channels. For example, you may need to combine the cost per lead plus the cost to move the prospect to become a customer to get the full cost per customer acquisition.
#7) Return on Investment
Finally, the return on investment or (ROI) is the amount of money you spent on a marketing campaign divided by the results of the campaign. It is the ratio of the total cost of your marketing efforts to the profit that you made.
Return on investment is one of the most important marketing KPIs to monitor as it can help you see if a marketing effort was worth it or not. If you find that the ROI was not high enough, you can adjust or stop the marketing tactic. If you find that the ROI was very high, you can run the campaign again (and again and again).
Make It Easier to Monitor Marketing KPIs
You can see how knowing these essential marketing KPIs can help you get a better look at the performance of your marketing strategies.
Knowing how to track and monitor these seven KPIs will make it easier for you to gauge your success and see what’s working and what’s not so you can optimize your campaigns for better results.
Now that you understand marketing KPIs, you need to know how to set up a system to monitor them. Use MySuite by MyArea Network to launch a dashboard that helps you view your most important marketing metrics from one dashboard.
The dashboard helps you import data from your ongoing marketing campaigns as well as from platforms like Google Analytics and Facebook so you can see all important data from one place.
Even better, it’s free along with your MyArea for Business profile so sign up today!
