What is a KPI in marketing and what is it for? –

Hosting Mautic QuickStart -50% with support in Spanish
24 hours and free training

Send up to 1,000,000 emails/year. Mautic support in Spanish 24 hours, 365 days

One of the most attractive hooks when making the decision to invest in digital marketing is precisely the possibility of measuring and analyzing each of the actions implemented thanks to the KPIs.

“Compared to traditional media, online marketing allows us to know exactly what the results obtained from each campaign are.”

However, you have to keep in mind that in this medium we have many different strategies to follow, and for each of them we have to measure different indicators or marketing KPIs.

For this reason, on this occasion we will leave aside the theoretical terms to learn how you can analyze the evolution of your different Internet campaigns.

Specifically, so that you do not miss a single detail, I will give you answers to questions such as:

What is a KPI?
What is the function of a KPI in marketing?
What examples of KPIs are the most remarkable in digital marketing?
How to choose KPIs and get the most out of them in your strategy?

That said, I encourage you to learn about all these aspects in detail and much more below 🙂

What is a KPI and what is its use?

As usual, I will start this article by analyzing with you what it is and how the main terms are defined. In this case, I will define in my own words what a KPI is in marketing.

“The acronym KPI comes from “Key Performance Indicator”, in Spanish “performance indicator”. In other words, it is an index by which we are going to measure the performance of a campaign or the achievement of previously set objectives.”

These KPis or indicators allow marketing to know the current situation of the actions and stipulate the path to follow.

In other words; they are the quantifiable or measurable aspects of a marketing campaign that you must analyze in detail to make strategic decisions for the future.

Utilities of KPIs in Marketing

If you have read the definition that I have given about KPIs, you will have already realized how important they are for any business. After all, they constitute the indicator that establishes the viability of a project in the short, medium and long term.

Specifically, some of the most notable uses of KPIs in marketing are power:

Monitor and maintain a control system during and after each campaign launched to act against possible contingencies.
Identify and understand possible errors or ineffective predefined strategies for a certain purpose.
Carry out a work system that launches continuous marketing actions over time.

Examples of KPIs in Digital Marketing

The most interesting thing about these measurement indicators is that they are used to measure results in different channels, as well as in different business areas; from production and finance departments, to the customer service area.

KPIs for Social Networks

In social networks we have lots of indicators that we can analyze to know aspects such as the reach of our publications or the number of people who interact with them.

In the following image you can see, as a circular graph, what are some of the most outstanding KPIs used by social media specialists:

Number of fans (Facebook), followers (), contacts (LinkedIn) of the online community in each social channel.
I like/dislike (like/dislike), favorites and other social markers that indicate the degree of acceptance of a publication.
Posting frequency of messages by account to know the fluctuation of interactions based on said variable.
Reach or number of people reached by a post (as opposed to impressions, which are the number of times people saw it).
Number of shares (Facebook shares), retweets (Twitter), repins (Pinterest), etc., of a publication by users.
Total number of comments originating from the same publication in a given period of time.
Total number of interactions per post, including previous KPIs.
Percentage of users or engagement of a publication calculated based on the interactions and the reach achieved by it.
Cost of obtaining leads through social networks in terms of time and money.
The return on investment (ROI) obtained after carrying out marketing actions on social networks.

KPIs for Email Marketing

Although it is true that users tend to avoid mass mailings that are worthless, it is a reality that they willingly accept receiving personalized emails loaded with information that solve their problems.

If you decide to include this channel in your online marketing strategy, you can count on indicators or KPIs such as the following:

Number of subscribers or people subscribed to a customer database, newsletter service or newsletter.
Number of users who unsubscribe from the subscription, measured after sending a campaign or on a recurring basis.
Openings or percentage of users who open the emails with respect to the total that have received it.
Clickers or number of times that users clicked on the different links, quantified individually and globally.
Demographic data such as gender, location, etc.
Reading devices to optimize the display of shipments based on these values.
Number of downloads in the case of an app or campaign with a link to downloadable content.
Leads or sales attracted from an email marketing or mailing campaign.
The return on investment (ROI) obtained after carrying out marketing actions through email.

KPIs for Online Advertising

In this aspect, the KPIs are almost infinite, or at least as many as the options you have to carry out online advertising campaigns, since depending on the tool you use you will have some measurements or others.

And it is that, it is not the same to carry out advertising actions in Facebook Ads than to publish ads in Google AdWords for the search engine or the display ones.

In any case, and in order not to lose your head with this matter, there are marketing indicators that you should not overlook in this area:

CTA or sales generated from a certain online advertising campaign based on its cost.
Clicks on the ad or number of people who clicked through to the landing page.
CTR or percentage of clicks with respect to all the people who have seen the ad.
Impressions or number of times a certain ad is shown.

Reach or number of people reached by an online advertising campaign (different from the number of impressions).

Period of time of each of each ad, of each ad group, of the entire campaign, etc.
Average position according to Google AdWords that indicates where users usually see a certain ad.

KPIs for the web

Many people do not spend enough time to measure any marketing KPI from their website, wasting all the potential that this would entail.

This is because we usually prioritize measuring the impact of promotional actions or content published on other channels.

However, any SEO consultant or agency can confirm that our website is a rich source of information. Among its most outstanding data we have:

Visits or number of times the website is visited, taking into account that the same visitor can enter several times.
Unique visitors or number of people who enter your website.
Number of new visitors to measure what percentage of them repeat and which do not return.
Page views or number of page views in total within the same website and for each visitor.
Average time of the visit or time that users spend on average browsing the page.
Demographic data such as cities or countries of connection, browser, device, age, gender, etc.
Leads or sales attracted in the case of online stores (ecommerce).

How to choose the KPIs for your Online Strategy?

If your question here is why or which of these KPIs you should measure, in general I will tell you that this will depend on your marketing objectives. For example, if you are developing a brand generation campaign on Twitter, knowing the possibilities offered by Facebook Ads will not be relevant to you.

However, if you act on specific channels and carry out actions such as email marketing, I can tell you with almost total certainty that all the KPIs mentioned for that area will be useful to you.

In this sense, to choose the appropriate KPIs you must take into account:

Goals: They represent the most decisive data when it comes to knowing which figures are going to be useful to you and which ones are not, regardless of whether you act via social media, email marketing, paid advertising or have your own website.
Channel of action: If you are going to act on Twitter, for example, it will be the platform itself that tells you the KPIs that you have the possibility of analyzing.
Medium and long-term work: It is necessary to know what results may be essential in the long term in order to be able to measure aspects that are not so relevant now.
Receivers: You may need to make different reports if they are going to be received by different people, since not everyone will have the same experience to analyze each and every one of the exposed KPIs.
Measuring tools: What programs or tools you are going to work with is also decisive, since not all of them work in the same way or offer the same data.

How to get more out of KPIs?

The simple fact of using KPIs to measure your online campaigns will already help you improve their performance. If, in addition, you optimize the use of these indicators, the results will be 10.

To do this, you must always remember to set short, medium and long-term goals, and make these goals measurable and comparable.

On the other hand, you must measure these KPIs from time to time, and not neglect the evolution of the campaigns. It is better to correct the faults in time than to analyze them once the actions have been completed.

It also helps to convert the results to graphs; Presenting the information visually facilitates the assimilation of all the data presented in the report.

conclusion

In this article, we have assessed the suitability of carrying out a studied follow-up of the evolution of a strategy…