What is a KPI in marketing and what is it for? Basic examples

Qué es un KPI en Marketing » Ejemplos de indicadores SEO y Social

In this article I will delve into clarifying what are the KPI in Marketing and how we should establish these indicators within the control panel of our company.

Analytics is probably one of the most complex parts of the marketing world and where they will have the KPI indicators a very important role.

In this article I will focus mainly on the KPIs relacionados con el SEO y el Social media, pero además os explicaré otros ejemplos de indicadores muy comunes. Para culminar el artículo os hablaré de las principales herramientas para medir el engagement en Redes Sociales, así como algunos examples of tools to measure your KPIs.

 

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What is a KPI and what is it for?

KPIs are indicators that help us measure and quantify our work, having previously defined objectives and activities that help us achieve these objectives.

Los KPI se llevan usando en el mundo de la economía y las finanzas desde hace muchos años con un único target mejorar la eficiencia y la productividad de uno o un conjunto de servicios, consiguiendo de esta dinámica que nuestro equipo de trabajo funcione como la “mejor orquesta de música”.

The siglas KPI proceden de “Key Performance Indicators” and translated into Spanish it would be key performance indicators.

 

KPI vs Metrics, do you know the differences?

Before we dive into key performance indicators, I'd like to clarify the difference between KPIs and metrics.

In online marketing we can measure so many things that sometimes we do not know how to distinguish what are the relevant metrics of a business.

This is why it is essential that you know how to distinguish between the two terms.

The metrics after all, they are a unit of measure with which we will be able to know what the evolution of a business is.

And this is where the fundamental difference comes in.

 

[clickToTweet tweet = »All KPIs are metrics, but not all metrics are KPIs #MarketingDigital» quote = »All KPIs are metrics, but not all metrics are KPIs #MarketingDigital»]

 

KPIs will be the most important metrics with which we will measure the health status of a project.

Has it now become clearer to you what KPI means?

 

What are the most important KPIs?

To make the previous explanation clearer, we are going to see an example.

Many people wonder what are the most important KPIs in marketing and truly, the solution is simpler than it seems.

The most important KPIs are those that directly impact the achievement of marketing objectives.

That is, you have to think about those metrics that directly impact your business.

Now let's see how to create KPI indicators.

 

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I always like to start from marketing goals and transform them to objetivos de la Web.

That is, as you can see in the graph, my marketing objective is focused on positioning, and transferred to the objective of the web means that they find me in Google.

For this purpose the examples of performance indicators clearer are: organic visits and the number of keywords positioned in Google.

Once they have found me, my next objective will be to obtain visibility that transformed into the objective of the web will be let them know me.

In this circumstance, examples of marketing indicators What will tell us if we are reaching our visibility objective will be the new visits, the page visits and the quality of those visits.

Is it clearer to you from this dynamic how to create KPIs?

What you will have to do once you have them established is to create a report table with the main KPIs to see the evolution of your business in a very simple way.

KPIs characteristics

When determining the KPIs, you always have to meet a series of conditions so that you can measure and compare them over time in order to know the evolution of your business.

All key performance indicators must be:

Measurable. Even when it seems obvious, a KPI must be measurable.

Achievable. The objectives that you set when selecting your KPIs have to be realistic and achievable in the period that we have established.

There is nothing more frustrating than determining unrealistic KPIs and then feeling like your goals are not being met.

[clickToTweet tweet = »Always define your KPI indicators with your feet on the ground #marketingonline» quote = »Always define your KPI indicators with your feet on the ground #marketingonline»]

Relevant. Elige solo aquellos indicadores más importantes y descarta aquellos que la información que nos ofrecen be poco interesante o relevante.

Newspaper. The indicator must be able to be analyzed periodically (weekly, monthly, quarterly, etc.) depending on the frequency that we have determined.

Specific. Choose only the most interesting part or aspect of the information collected.

 

 

Examples of KPIs in Marketing

The decision of how I choose the KPIs should proceed on those indicators that truly impact your business or company, but to facilitate their creation, here I leave you an extensive list of KPI examples that you can apply so much to your strategy SEO como Social.

Retorno de Inversión (ROI)

We have to measure the income generated by our marketing campaign and compare it with the expense it entails.

Sales increase

The objective is to show that our marketing campaign is leading to an increase in sales.

Fuentes del traffic

The objective is to measure and examine the different means or sources where we manage to attract visits to our business website.

There are 4 types:

Direct traffic. Son aquellos usuarios que nos visitan escribiendo la dirección url en el propio browser.

Cuanto más conocido y popular es nuestra marca en Internet más tráfico directo podemos obtener.

Referral traffic. Visits we receive through links on other websites.

East tráfico de referencia lo podemos categorizar en:

• Visits we receive through social channels.
• Mención. Visitas que recibimos por un link en un Blog o portal web semejante que nos ha mencionado.

Organic traffic. Los usuarios descubren tu portal web cuando realizan una consulta en los principales buscadores (Google, Bing and Yahoo!).

Para obtener incrementar nuestro organic traffic necesitamos realizar una buena Estrategia SEO, que nos ayude a mejorar la visibilidad de nuestro sitio en los principales buscadores.

Campaign traffic. Estas visitas proceden de campañas de anuncios que podemos hacer en diferentes medios, aún cuando los más conocidos son los anuncios en adwords, anuncios en Facebook y anuncios en twitter, pero hay muchos más.

Funnel de ventas

Aspecto muy importante en el Inbound Marketing, puesto que entender el procedimiento de cómo conseguimos clientes o ventas es fundamental para que podamos optimizarlo.

East embudo de conversion It thoroughly analyzes the customer acquisition procedure, an aspect that will help us enormously to know how potential customers discover our product or brand.

The marketing funnel is usually divided into 5 stages: awareness, interest, consideration, preference and purchase, and with this we will be able to know the conversion rates in each of the stages and extract what are our strengths and weaknesses that help us to convert possibilities into sales.

 

Measurement of success rate

The objective is to measure the effectiveness of your actions that are helping you to achieve the objectives set.

Mediremos el número de persons que completan un objetivo de marketing específico como por ejemplo la subscription a una lista de correos, y nos ayudan para saber la conversion rate de los usuarios que llegan a la fase de consideración.

Establish specific marketing objectives, such as email subscription, ebook sales, or whatever action we are seeking to obtain leads, and analyze the total conversion and the conversion rate, which is nothing more than dividing the total visits by the number of read got.

There are many factors that can change or vary this conversion rate, but as a general rule the conversion rate is usually between 4% or 5%, even though from my experience I tell you that it can sometimes be higher, exceeding the 10% conversion.

What conversion rate do you get in your sales strategies?

Rendimiento de las keywords

We have to analyze the ranking of our keywords to measure and understand the effectiveness of our SEO strategy, and fundamentally in what refers to the traffic of visits that it contributes to us.

Para poder obtener leads tenemos que obtener cientos de visitas a nuestra landing page o portal web, pero dado a los grandes cambios de algorithm y la volatilidad de la posición de nuestros rankings, es importante prestar especial atención a:

1.- List of keywords. We have to analyze the evolution of the list of keywords that is capturing visitor traffic on Google.

You can use SEMrush para ver la evolución de los últimos meses de las keywords de tu portal web que tienes posicionadas en la página 1 y 2 de Google.

2.- Position of each of the keywords. We will analyze the position that each keyword occupies, as well as its evolution.

3.- Increase the CTR. We will analyze the CTR of our articles and pages, since we have to increase the CTR as much as possible so that with it it affects a better SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

4.- Reduce the Rebound percentage. La primera impresión sí que cuenta para mejorar el SEO puesto que si el Username no le atrae lo que ve o lee en pocos segundos, es muy probable que abandone nuestra página y con ello obtengamos un Bounce Rate muy alto.

Para evitarlo debes de prestar fundamentalmente atención a la imagen destacada y al contents del primer párrafo, puesto que debes de impactar y enganchar al usuario para que se interese por lo que está viendo.

5.- Increase the average visit time. For visitors to spend many minutes on our web portal, it is important that you follow the following tips:

• Bet on quality because it is the key factor in SEO.
• Use powerful images and infographics.
• Give your content as practical as possible.

Other KPIs in content marketing:

Unique Visitors

This KPI indicator in marketing provides us with a standard metric since we will be able to know how many people have visited your site or your content in a specific interval of time. 

Origin

Knowing our audience is very important so that we can focus more or less effort on a specific location.

With Google analytics lograremos conseguir información como:

• Datos demográficos de nuestra audiencia con datos como edad y sexo.
• Cities and countries that most visit our page.
• You will be able to know which country or city brings the highest ROI.

Visits from mobile devices

Es esencial conocer cuántos usuarios consultan y leen tus contenidos desde dispositivos móviles, puesto que esto es importante para saber si nuestra web tiene un buen diseño responsive.

User heat map

I use 2 tools to analyze the heat map of the users to see in which places they have more incidence; the first is CrazyEgg que nos permite crear un mapa de calor de nuestro portal web, y la segunda es Sumome, que podemos ver un mapa de calor donde los visitantes hacen clic. 

Final share rate and range

This KPI indicator measures the effectiveness of our marketing campaign paying our full attention to the last action performed by the user who visits us. These are some of the final actions that this KPI could collect:

1.- Departure. Visitor leaving our page.

2.- Rebound. We will analyze the bounce rate.

3.- Social. Visitors end their visit on our social channels.

4.- Contact. The visitor makes contact with us through any of the communication channels that we have established.

5.- Lead. We will collect data from users interested in our product or service.

6.- Purchase. El número de visitantes que se transforman en client y finalizan su visita con una compra o contratación de un servicio.

Cost per Lead

Este KPI mide la efectividad de nuestra campaña de marketing. Esto es muy importante porque tenemos que cuantificar el coste o gasto de nuestras acciones para dividirlo en total de leads, y podemos saber a cuanto cumple dicho coste por lead.

This cost per click helps us calculate the return on investment or ROI.

This cost per lead can be calculated in 2 ways:

1.- General. The cost per lead of our entire marketing strategy is defined.

2.- Specific. We analyze the cost per lead of an individual campaign (SEO, Adwords, banners, ads on social networks, etc.).

Email Marketing Engagement

The goal of this KPI indicator is to measure the effectiveness of our email marketing strategy.

We will analyze aspects such as:

• Open rate.
• Click rate.
• Leads obtained.
• Purchases obtained.

We will also use this indicator to measure ROI.

Social KPIs

Since the arrival of Social Networks, they have introduced a large number of KPI indicators that measure interactions and objectives in the social environment.

One of the best known Social Media KPIs is the one that measures interaction, that is, it analyzes the effectiveness of our campaign based on the Engagement in Social Networks obtained.

Another social indicator is the growth of our communities of followers in the different social channels, even though the ideal is to link to the previous KPI so that we can analyze the quality of the followers based on their degree of social engagement.

 

At the same time, when executing a social media strategyto a fundamental phase is the measurement of results.

But to be able to measure them correctly you must have previously defined the KPI in the most important social networks.

Otherwise you will be wasting your time and money by not really knowing if your social media strategy is working or not.

So that this does not happen to you, in the next image you have a list with the most important metrics of the main social networks.

Now you no longer have any excuse to measure KPIs in social networks.

Ejemplos de KPI para Ecommerce, Google Adwords and Facebook Ads

The best way to know the health status of your ecommerce or online store is through the creation of a dashboard that includes your main KPIs.

To facilitate this task, in this image you can different KPI examples for an ecommerce.

At the same time, normally, if you have an ecommerce, you will carry out different commercial promotion campaigns, and one of the channels that you can use is Google Adwords.

I also indicate which are the main KPI examples for Google Adwords.

That Facebook Ads is in "fashion" for online business promotion campaigns is nothing new.

Virtually all companies are trying this type of commercial promotion on Facebook, but are you really measuring well the results they are obtaining?

In the image you also have several examples of Facebook Ads KPIs that are sure to be great for analyzing your ad campaign.

For me personally, a Facebook Ads metric that I usually pay attention to is the ROAS that tells you for every € 1 invested how many euros you recover.

 

Tools to Measure Activity on Social Networks

Social Mention

Undoubtedly one of the best free tools to analyze the mentions of any brand or business.

How Sociable

With this free function you will be able to have a first photo of how sociable any brand or company is.

Ubervu

You will be able to have access to quantitative and qualitative metrics, and you will have the option to view all your social profiles from the same administration panel.

 

Crowdbooster

With this payment function you will be able to analyze your engagement on Facebook and Twitter.

Klear

A tool with which you will be able to analyze the engagement of your brand as well as that of your competition.

Audiense

You will be able to have access to a complete analytical report of your brand on Twitter, where you can see, for example, the interactions and which articles have had the best engagement.

Other tools to measure KPIs in Marketing

KPI Watch Dog

Monitoring tool that we will be able to use to analyze up to 5 KPI indicators for free.

Simple KPI

Payment tool with which you will be able to analyze the KPIs of your marketing strategy and that you will be able to test 14 days for free.

Mix Panel

Tool that you can use in its free version and that will help you to make your “first steps” by analyzing your first KPIs.

Geckoboard

It is one of the best tools to analyze KPIs and carry all the analytics from a single administration panel.

The cheapest license for this tool will cost you 19 $ per month.

Google analytics

The most used analytical tool in the world and that you will also be able to use to determine objectives and analyze ROI.

Espero que este post os sea de gran ventaja para que comencéis a establecer vuestros first KPI indicators, e incluirlos en vuestra estrategia de marketing. Os recomiendo que vayáis introduciéndoos poco a poco en cada una de las herramientas para que podáis optimize todo su potencial.

Google Search Console

Basic tool where we will be able to get very practical data to complement our measurements.

 

What other KPI indicators do you use?

Do you think the measurement of KPIs is important in Marketing?

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