Why Focusing On Only A Few KPIs In Digital Marketing Is Essential

Digital Marketing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are goals that can be quantified and assist you with tracking as well as measuring success. KPIs are a valuable way for digital marketers to set expectations as well as prove that their work is having a positive impact on the company as a whole. To outsiders, the success of digital marketing activity can be seen as challenging to measure; however, this really isn’t the case. It’s usually easier to measure progress for a digital campaign as opposed to an offline one owing to the vast array of statistics that can be gathered as from these activities.

Digital marketing metrics, as well as KPIs, are values that are made us of by digital marketing teams in order to measure as well as track the performance of their digital marketing campaigns. Digital marketing teams utilise a number of tools to promote their services in addition to products. Tracking the outcomes can often be time-consuming and difficult. This means that by creating specific digital marketing KPIs, it’s easy to determine targets and goals in addition to measuring performance based on those values.

How to put together successful digital marketing KPIs

The best digital marketing KPIs follow the SMART framework. This a system that is often used in management consulting as well as other business areas. KPIs should be:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Achievable
• Relevant
• Time-Bound

To illustrate this concept, for example, let’s say you want to reach 20 000 Instagram followers on your business account. To convert this to a SMART KPI, here’s the context you’d need to think about:

• To influence Instagram sales (relevant), I want to grow the company’s Instagram following (specific) from 10k to 20k (measurable) this quarter (time-bound), using a social media agency (achievable).

As another example, let’s say you want to get more website traffic. To make this KPI smart, you’d break it down like this:

• I want more people to visit our website and become customers (relevant), so this month (time-bound), I want to boost our organic search traffic (specific) from 70,000 visitors per month to 80,000 visitors per month (measurable), which I’ll do primarily through link-building and improved keyword ranking (achievable).

Why less is more when talking about digital marketing KPIs

One of the best things about SEO – as well as digital marketing in general – is that the results which this work brings about can be measured easily. The only catch is that it is necessary to know which KPIs to track. There are so many digital marketing KPIs out there to work with. To be effective with measuring your results, it is necessary to choose only a few.

The digital marketing industry is expanding at an astounding pace. This means that there are more and more ways to play (and – more importantly – win) the game. There are literally hundreds of KPIs that we can track. This being said, not all of them are equally significant to the health of your business. For example your traffic is growing, which is fantastic, however, what’s the next step? Do all these new site visitors boost your profits? Not this is not necessarily true. This means that you’ll also want to focus on measuring just the traffic which functions to increase profits.

The same is true for your followers on social media or, alternatively, the number of your likes, shares as well as comments. Evaluating these social engagement metrics isn’t sufficient to know what’s going on with your digital marketing performance. These numbers make you feel great however; unfortunately, they’re pointless. They’re even called vanity metrics by some. Getting too wrapped up in these may cost your business a lot.

Thus, to avoid unnecessary expenditure – that doesn’t translate into a tangible return on investment – you need to focus on the KPIs which will bring in a solid return. For example, focus on measuring your website visitors who complete the purchase cycle on your site as opposed to those who merely browse your articles on the blog.

Get in touch with the Digital School of Marketing

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