- As you move your marketing forward,
you may have established objectives and key results
for your quarterly performance,
but you'll want to establish granular success metrics
for each of your marketing objectives.
A nimble and common approach for this is through
the creation of key performance indicators, or KPIs.
KPIs let you measure the performance
of a particular activity such as an outbound email campaign
or a fall sales event.
By monitoring your KPIs, you'll see what's working,
what's not, and what is impacting something else.
Now, when you go about creating your KPIs,
make sure they're aligned to your business goals.
They need to be measurable and easy to understand.
So a good KPI might be increase traffic 5%
month over month, whereas a bad KPI would be
increase traffic each month.
If you don't have a quantifiable goal,
it's not easy to interpret the results.
Sure, you might be satisfied with growing traffic
but if you're only growing by a few visits per month,
you've got a problem.
And that problem wouldn't be visible
if your KPI got the check mark
because it was simply to increase traffic.
You want your KPIs to be tied to your marketing objectives
because then they're influenced by your effort.
They'll let you know when to celebrate
and when to make something better.
So, for example, if you're running an advertisement
as a test to see if you can get acquisition costs
to an acceptable level, you might want a KPI that says,
achieve a $40 CPA, or cost per action.
If you went with achieve 100 sales,
well, you'd be focusing on measuring something
you're not actually trying to achieve.
You could succeed at that $40 CPA
and then scale your KPI to be
generate 100 sales per month at a $40 cost per action.
To help get you started, here's some items
to consider creating a KPI around.
For online sales, look at your conversion rate
and the cost per acquisition or action.
For broader marketing objectives,
set a KPI for total revenue and even the ratio
of new to returning visitors.
If you're using a landing page, set a bounce rate KPI.
This way, you can identify if your inbound traffic
isn't targeted enough,
or if the content isn't relevant enough.
As you consider your KPIs, do yourself a favor
and avoid worrying about things
that aren't impacting your bottom line.
Page views might be impressive
but only if they're actually driving revenue.
I track business and marketing KPIs
with a Google spreadsheet,
but you can also look at software from geckoboard.com
or cyfe.com to build out really meaningful KPI dashboards
that give you at a glance information.
Take your time and pick the metrics that are relevant to you
and then organize them in a way
that makes sense for your business.