The 7 Best KPIs for Analyzing Your Online Marketing Campaigns

Web analytics and business intelligence are key for evaluating the success of your project. Surveys reflect it too: 2 out of every 3 marketing professionals say that data-based decisions are more effective than those taken by mere impulse and 76% of leaders base their decisions on data analysis. But to ensure a proper analysis, you need clear objectives. And that means you need KPIs. 

KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) are units of measure used for web analytics. They allow any company with online marketing campaigns to know their successes and mistakes. It’s key information to have so you’re not wasting time and money randomly launching online actions. 

(Image: We Are Marketing)

KPIs in Marketing: always look for SMART 

What are the variables that we must keep in mind for all strategies? We always have to look for those that can be measured and those that provide objective and conclusive information about the performance of a determined action. As an example, we could consider the bounce rate of a website or the number of users that visit a corporate blog through a CTA on social media.

As a general role, when it comes time to define a representative KPI for online marketing campaigns, we must employ the same parameter that we use for establishing goals: SMART. It’s a simple but effective method. All KPIs must be: 

• Specific
• Measurable 
• Attainable
• Realistic
• Time-based 

If it doesn’t meet these requirements, the information collected will not be useful for making objective decisions: to keep moving forward with the same strategy or propose changes. 

KPI Marketing Examples and 7 Important Metrics 

Choosing KPIs depends on many factors and they’re not always the same. On one hand, there are conversion-centered campaigns where KPIs are the purchases of a product or service or earned money. These KPIs make more sense for when you have to justify your goals to your CMO or CFO. 

On the other hand, within marketing teams themselves, we usually look for more open and qualitative KPIs like the number of generated leads, campaign engagement, or follower growth. In reality, the goals of each campaign are the KPIs and there’s no one answer. And it’s important to note that the list of KPIs may be endless, but you have to prioritize them and limit yourself to the few that are truly necessary. 

These are some of the most important KPIs: 

CPL 

CPL means cost per lead. It’s a formula to learn how much money a company invested to acquire each of their leads, usually after a campaign. The CPL is a very important KPI to learn the project’s profitability, given that it allows you to observe the effectiveness of your investment for capturing new potential clients. 

ROI

Return on investment, known as ROI, is a daily term for digital marketing teams. ROI is a simple calculation through which performance through investment of a campaign or ad action is measured. It’s especially useful for 360º campaigns and is calculated as: 

ROI = (obtained benefit - investment)/investment)

Number of New Leads

This is one of the classic KPIs and also most effective when it comes to knowing if a campaign had a positive or negative impact. A lead is a user who has given us their personal information (their email, for example) and enters the company’s database. It gives us permission to keep interacting with them, nurture them with content, and begin to push conversion. 

Engagement Rate on Social Media

The level of “connection” of brand followers can be measured through the amount of likes, mentions, or comments obtained on Facebook or Instagram and the number of favorites or retweets achieved on Twitter in an established period of time. 

Audience Growth on Social Media

With this variable, you can quantify the number of achieved followers; for example, during a month on each social network where the brand is present. It’s useful to link the growth study to concrete actions realized on each network (post promotion, campaign launches) to learn why growth occurs and extract valuable insights about your audience’s behavior. 

Bounce Rates Online

How many people have abandoned or interrupted their visit to a website or online store? This data is important not only to know the degree of rejection of a certain content or publication, but also to detect possible loading errors that may damage the user experience.

Permanency Rate

Related to the previous KPI, this rate allows us to know, on average, how long a user stays on the company’s website or blog. It also allows us to proportionally measure the level of satisfaction of the users with the offered content. 

Number of Visits 

How many users viewed a blog or corporate site in a determined period of time? This indicator is fundamental for not just the number of visits (sessions) received, but also to know from what site or channel a user arrived at the site or blog. We must remember that web analytic tools count each visit from a different device; for example, a tablet and smartphone are counted separately, even if it’s the same user. 

Higher Traffic and Conversion Keywords

Quantify what keywords of the brand are the most searched for by users online and what level of conversion they entail. 

KPIs of Email Marketing

In the case of email marketing, there are other specific KPIs that we can take on: 

• Number of new subscribers achieved in a specific period of time
• Number of followers lost in this period after unsubscribing from company notifications
• Open and click rate, in function of the percentage of people that have opened the email and the number of users that have clicked, for example, on the link to a landing page or that have downloaded an ebook. The opening rate is a good indicator of the errors or good choices that the brand is making: if there’s an attractive subject line, if emails are being sent at good times, or if the frequency of emails is ideal. 

Properly measuring and analyzing your KPIs will allow you to compare distinct actions over different years or months and learn what content, techniques, and trends are the most successful with your online community. The lesson is this: there’s not just one KPI that’s the most important for all companies or industries. It’s the responsibility of marketing professionals to choose the most representative metrics of the progress and evolution we want to achieve and work on those. They could be quantitative (revenue based) or qualitative (brand awareness); the most important thing is to clearly define the goal and, from there, decide the right metrics that allow us to advance.