How Key Performance Indicators Help You Market Better

Often, people are careful about planning and launching a content marketing campaign. They spend hours brainstorming, drafting, and editing blog posts, web copy, and advertisements. It is a good thing—marketing collateral influences audiences’ impressions of a brand.

However, evaluating marketing campaigns is just as important. You wouldn’t know what strategies are working if you don’t measure your copy’s performance. Having key performance indicators or KPIs for content enables you to refine your digital campaigns. Here are three vital groups of KPIs that help you measure your project’s success.

SEO Metrics

Rankings on SERPs, backlinks earned, organic clicks and click-through rates, page speed, crawl errors, and impressions can all be considered SEO metrics.

This type of KPI is valuable because it shows you how your website is objectively performing online. The number of people viewing your site, the amount of time they spend on it, and how much of the market share you’re getting based on the keywords you’re targeting. When you don’t measure these KPIs—or measure incorrectly—it could result in faulty strategic decisions that can lead you down the wrong direction.

For example, if you make a change based on the metrics from a single month instead of over several years or months, you risk adjusting your strategy based on unique and temporary circumstances. Holidays and national events tend to affect browsing behaviors; if you apply a different marketing approach because of data from these periods, it might not work for the “regular” season.

Conversion Metrics

People with artistic inclinations succeed in digital marketing, but it is still firmly in the realm of business. Although marketers can employ writing and design in content writing and creating social media advertisements, their efforts still need to create conversions. What’s more, these marketing efforts need accurate reporting that properly lays out the return on investment that the company gained. Managers and executives need to clearly see how these marketing campaigns are helping the business bring in customers.

As such, it’s vital to know which aspects of a marketing campaign to measure. One place to start would be the performance of keyword phrases. 

Search volume, correlations between product performance and ad spend, and other metrics like cost per click and market competition will show a keyword’s viability for both PPC and SEO. The more people search for a term, the higher the demand for products and services related to it. You must also consider a product’s conversion rates. These rates show how effective your content is in convincing readers to take action. If you have content with low conversion rates—if people don’t sign up, or they don’t complete a purchase—you could try conducting an A/B test.

A/B testing enables you to locate points of improvement on your website and allows you to improve on your content without doing a complete overhaul.

A third conversion metric you should watch is the number of positive reviews you get. Reviews on your website or third-party aggregators influence how people view your business. These strangers can turn into believers if they see positive feedback about your company, or they could get turned off if they see complaints from current customers. 

That said, don’t resort to black hat tactics like spamming competitors with negative reviews or flooding your page with positive ones. These methods eventually catch up with you and result in penalties, leaving you worse off.

User Engagement Metrics

Finally, there are user engagement metrics. These are important because they tell marketers how effective their content is at drawing people in and making them state on their website. Bounce rate, time on page, number of views, and conversion rates are significant and show you how much people pay attention to your content. However, it’s easy to get skewed or erroneous data on these things, leading to faulty strategies.

For example, suppose you have a page with a high conversion rate—your records show that you have 3,000 instances of sales you can attribute to the page. On the surface, it looks like an impressive metric. However, you need to check the number of individuals who bought the service. 

Those instances may be because of ten buyers purchasing your products a combined 3,000 times. If you don’t dig deep into this metric, you might make a campaign targeting buyers you don’t have, which will be costly to your business.

You could avoid this by having goals in Google Analytics or setting UTM parameters. When you do this, you will be more effective in seeing a person’s actual path through your website. When you tie conversion metrics into your goals, you will know whether your products successfully convert.

Besides tracking conversions, engagement metrics are also vital if you want to get insights into what people are doing on your website. For example, you can use engagement metrics to determine which pages would benefit from A/B testing.

Conclusion

Key performance indicators can help you set realistic goals that align with your marketing context. There are different types of KPIs that you can use to shape your overall strategy. Don’t launch anything without defining what success looks like for that specific campaign.

Choosing the right KPIs and knowing which data matters to your business enables you to match audience expectations, influence what they consume from your brand, and ultimately drive success for your brand online.

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