Well set up Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) and Targets are key pillars in any digital marketing campaign strategy. It goes without saying, meaningful targets and KPI’s increase your chances of success.
Let’s take a step back for a moment. What are KPI’s, Targets and Goals?
- A Key Performance Indicator (KPI) is a metric or a quantifiable measure that determines the success of your strategic goals and objectives. In this case the success of your digital marketing campaign.
- Targets are those indicators that you use to determine the success of your efforts in relation to your overall goals and objectives. Like reaching a milestone in a specified time.
- Goals are your business objectives. They are the sole reason you start a campaign in the first place.
Now that we got the definitions out of the way. Let’s focus on how you can set up meaningful KPI’s and Targets that will increase the chances of you succeeding in your digital campaigns.
Well Defined KPI’s
In any given digital campaign there can be many performance indicators. To better your chances of success, you must only focus on the most important indicators, the ones that add value to the overall campaign strategy. In doing so, not only will it save you time in making sense of useless information but it will also give you more time to focus on the important areas of your campaign. It’s actually in the name “Key” performance indicators. You should have enough metrics to work with, but not too much and not less.
KPI’s can be in the form of absolute figures, proportional or percentages and can also be fractions. You can group your metrics into four groups. This will help in making a visualization where you need to exert effort in your KPI’s and improve:
Process Metrics: These are the ones used to measure your business processes. This can be the time it’s taking for your customers to complete a purchase in your online shopping site. Right from when they click on check-out, until when the payment is successful.
People Metrics: User interactions with your site can be a good metric to keep track of. This could be how many users are accessing your site? How many are frequent users against new users? You can also track how many users are coming to your site using organic searches or paid search. This is a group of metrics that are related to your user interactions.
Customer Metrics: Now looking at the customers’ pool, these are metrics for measuring values of those who have actually completed a transaction on your site. You can track how best the site is meeting their need and retaining customers, the number of customers that make repeat purchases as opposed to those who don’t. Even how satisfied are those customers, and how likely are they to recommend your business to others?
Financial Metrics: Here we are talking about events or actions that are of a monetary value. Things like the improvements in sales figures. How much it costs to increase visitors? We can also talk about customer acquisition cost. This is mainly the financial measure of the campaign efforts.
Working with Targets
Working on a new campaign can be overwhelming. It’s always good to research and have a better understanding of the field you are working in. Try and get benchmarks of certain metrics from other organizations your similar industry or trade. Note that your own KPI’s and Targets can be different from another Organisation in your similar business field. That way you can set up realistic and achievable targets. Focusing on your targets you also need to set up clearly defined and specific targets. To get a better sense of time on your campaign. Your targets should be timeous and a realistic timeframe.
Another factor to consider when setting up your targets is to account for seasonal trends. For example:- an e-commerce site that sells White Water Rafting equipment may not make higher profit margins during winter than in summer. So when setting targets its good to be conscious of such environmental factors otherwise your effort might be lost. Also, a common mistake with some campaign managers is that they tend to set only top-level outcome targets and leave out appropriate lower level targets. You cannot just focus on a target for increasing the blog engagement on your site without an underlying target of creating more interesting blog articles since it has a cause and effect relationship.
If you are not sure where to start in measuring and defining your online success Contact Us.
Article Author : Nigel Hakata
