The digital marketing KPIs to look out for

Surely you've heard of KPIs but you don't know what they mean or what they can be used for in our digital marketing strategy. If this happens to you too, stay and read this post. We'll tell you all about it!

what are KPIs and what are they for?

Theterm KPI refers to a series of metrics that are used to synthesise information about the effectiveness and productivity of the actions carried out in a business in order to make decisions and determine those that have been most effective in meeting the objectives set in a particular process or project. KPIs are also known as quality indicators or key business indicators that could be very useful in digital marketing. Therefore, KPIs can allow us to measure the performance of a process or present a value related to a goal that has been previously established.

As far as digital marketing is concerned, KPIs are the values that our business can use to measure the performance of the marketing campaigns we are carrying out and if they are really working. In this way, KPIs allow us to analyse the tools we are using in our online marketing strategy and the effectiveness of each one of them. In this way and thanks to them we can measure more easily both the effectiveness of the measures and the results we are getting from them.

How to establish KPIs

Once we know what a KPI is and what it can be used for in our company, we must establish and set our own KPIs to help us measure the achievements of our digital marketing campaign. When setting a KPI there are three key aspects:

1. Deciding on the variable to measure.
2. Identifying the overall long-term strategic objective.
3. Setting the specific short-term goals.

• Probably the most difficult part of setting KPIs is deciding what to measure. It is important to establish which parts of the campaign you want to monitor and track them. The first step to thisis to identify your long-term strategic objective. For example, if your main objective is to double your number of customers in the next 3 years, you have set your overall objective there. This overall objective will guide you in determining other smaller goals that you need to achieve beforehand. From here, you simply need to divide this overall objective into smaller annual and quarterly objectives.
  This division can be done in different ways,depending on the deadlines you have set for yourself, the business requirements and the resources available:
• Linear improvement: If you believe that the overall goal will be achieved through constant improvement, simply divide the goal by the number of periods, giving each goal the same level of importance.
• Quick wins:This literally means something like quick goals. With this method of working you accept to achieve some goals quickly, although the effect of the results diminishes over time. It is usually an alternative to take into account when it is necessary to introduce improvements to solve an existing problem that we have already focused on.
• Long-term investment: We can also find the opposite case to the above. We must invest in a process that will give us results in the future. This example represents the case of inbound marketing, for which we cannot expect great results in the first year(except for companies that meet the necessary requirements to apply inbound techniques), but in which the benefits begin to accelerate from the second year onwards.

Finally, don't forget that,in order to set good KPIs, it is good practice to try to follow the SMART philosophy. This philosophy is about adhering to the following principles in your KPIs:

• Specific: they should be concrete and specific KPIs, e.g. instead of visits, organic visits to our product page.
• Measurable: they should be easy to measure or quantify, e.g. instead of engagement, average time on page per visit.
• Achievable: they should be achievable but at the same time challenging, for example: instead of 2 million followers, 2,000 followers. It is more realistic and we know that we can achieve it more easily than the above.
• Relevant: they should have a relevant impact on the business, for example: instead of video views on our YouTube channel, conversions to customers on our landing page.
• Temporal: they should be related to a time horizon, for example: instead of sales, sales in the first quarter of 2021, limiting the time frame to just a few months.

The digital marketing KPIs you should consider

Having too many KPIs can make the team lose focus, while making it difficult to track the progress of the different indicators. The most common is to have a single main KPI and, at most, a secondary and a tertiary one. This way, we will focus on what we really want to measure and leave aside everything that does not contribute anything to our online marketing strategy .

There are dozens of possible indicators with which to measure your campaigns. Some of them depend on the specific channel through which you establish the relationship with users. The important thing is that for digital marketing KPIs to be effective, they must be accompanied by a value. Only if you know what you want to achieve can you analyse the appropriate ways to achieve it.

Some of the most commonly used KPIs that you should take into account are:

• Number of visits: The number of visits your blog or website receives will be a basic indicator to know how many people you attract, where they come from and what their interests are.
  
• Time spent: The time spent on the website or blog is one of the most valuable digital marketing KPIs. It shows the interest generated by your content, as well as the chances of getting clicks and conversions on the page itself.
  
• Emails read: The number of email openings that your emailing campaign has will be essential to know how many people it has reached and how many of the email recipients have shown interest in the content, as well as the clicks on the email, which will allow us to know what has most interested the user of our email.
  
  
• Followers: This is a very important metric if we develop part of our marketing campaign on social networks. Followers, likes or fans are the perfect indicator to know the reach of your profile. In order to effectively assess this metric, it is necessary to set a threshold of followers that you want to obtain, as a higher number is not always more positive.
  
• Comments: The number of comments that the content generates among users is essential data. This is one of the digital marketing KPIs that focus on the value of the content. In fact, it indicates whether the content is important enough to generate discussion and comments among users.
  
  
• CTR: The Click-Through Rate (CTR)shows how often users viewing an online marketing action end up clicking on the links shown to them

  CTR is one of the basic digital marketing KPIs to evaluate the performance of a campaign in any of the digital marketing channels.

In summary, these are some of the KPIs you can take into account to track your marketing campaign. However, there are some more. The important thing is that you know what you want to measure with each of them and take advantage of the tool to know the relevance of your online marketing campaign.