ROI: What KPIs Should You Track During Your Marketing Campaigns?

When you are running a marketing campaign, it’s important to be able to accurately track its effectiveness. That way you know what works well enough that you can re-use ideas or concepts in the future and what did not work well and needs to be improved or scrapped. There are three types of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for marketing campaigns that you can use. Here’s a quick guide.

Total Numbers

The first type are raw numbers that you can use to see how much total interest and engagement your marketing campaigns were able to generate. They include metrics such as the following:

• Sales Revenue — how much in sales did your marketing campaign bring in?
• Number of Leads — how many people called or emailed your business because of your marketing campaign?
• Foot Traffic — how many people visited your store as a result of your marketing campaign?

When you are planning a new campaign, make sure you have ways to accurately track and measure these metrics. You can achieve that with barcodes or coupons the customers need to hand over to you that they received in the mail or printed off and by using unique tracking phone numbers. These allow you to directly record every instance of sales, leads, and traffic.

Conversions

The raw totals might seem more impressive because they’re the bigger numbers, but they do not necessarily tell a clear and honest story of how effective your campaign was. You might have spent far more money to have an efficient campaign than you needed to, which is why Conversion metrics help you figure out how effective certain parts of your campaign were and where you can improve. Conversion stats include the following:

• Conversion Rate — at what rate does someone who receives your marketing message convert to a lead?
• Lead-To-Customer Rate — at what rate are your leads converted into paying customers?
• Cost Per Lead & Sale — how much are you spending to convert each lead or paying customer?

Different types of campaigns will have better conversion rates than others. To improve efficiency, make sure you focus your targeting to customers who are lower in the sales funnel and more likely to be interested in your product or service.

For example, maybe you see that you’re generating lots of leads at an efficient rate, but you aren’t converting them to paying customers. This should tell you that your sales team needs to improve on their sales approach, or maybe you’re not bringing in the right kind of leads. Or maybe your cost per lead or sale is higher than the value of a conversion, which means you need to improve your campaign’s efficiency: try a different medium, mix up the advertisement’s creative or message, target a different demographic, and so on.

Online Metrics

Lastly, there’s online marketing campaigns which are a different animal than more traditional marketing campaigns (print, radio, TV, mail, etc). The advantage of online marketing is they can be very responsive, dynamic, and hyper targeted. Here are the main ways to track online marketing campaigns:

• Social media — followers gained, engagement with promotional posts or ads (likes, retweets, etc), and clicks and conversions
• Email blasts — clicks and click through rate, opens and open rate, responses and response rate
• Website — clicks and click rate, conversions, time on page, bounce rate for paid, organic traffic and mobile traffic

Online marketing makes tracking these metrics very easy as well, as you can set up every website, page, post, and advertisement to count clicks and conversions, calculate conversions and other metrics, and even track each user’s other online behavior.

The main purpose of planning a marketing campaign is that you want to either generate traffic or leads, or see results. However, you want each campaign to have purpose and to be effective to produce the results you’re hoping for. Therefore, tracking numbers, conversions and other online data or metric will help you to determine what works and what doesn’t.

With that being said, many businesses need some insight or advice from marketing experts they can trust, that’s where we come in. Get started today with a free eBook from Third Angle.