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What is a KPI in Marketing »Examples of SEO and Social indicators

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 related to SEO and Social Media, but I will also explain other examples of very common indicators. To conclude the article I will talk about the main tools to measure engagement in Social Networks, as well as some 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.

KPIs have been used in the world of economics and finance for many years with a single objective to improve the efficiency and productivity of one or a set of services, achieving from this dynamic that our work team functions as the "best music orchestra ”.

The KPI acronyms come from "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.

 

main kpi in marketing

I always like to start from marketing goals and transform them to objectives of the 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. Choose only the most important indicators and discard those that the information they offer us is uninteresting or relevant.

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.

kpi examples and infographic tools 

 

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 SEO as Social strategy.

Return on Investment (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.

Traffic sources

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. They are those users who visit us by typing the url address in the browser itself.

The more known and popular our brand is on the Internet, the more direct traffic we can get.

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

We can categorize this referral traffic into:

  • Visits we receive through social channels.
  • Mention. Visits that we receive through a link in a blog or similar web portal that you have mentioned.

Organic traffic. Users discover your web portal when they make a query in the main search engines (Google, Bing and Yahoo).

To increase our organic traffic we need to carry out a good SEO Strategy, which helps us improve the visibility of our site in the main search engines.

Campaign traffic. These visits come from ad campaigns that we can do in different media, even though the best known are adwords ads, facebook ads and twitter ads, but there are many more.

Sales funnel

Very important aspect in Inbound Marketing, since understanding the procedure of how we get customers or sales is essential so that we can optimize it.

East conversion funnel 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.

We will measure the number of people who complete a specific marketing objective such as subscribing to a mailing list, and help us to know the conversion rate of users who reach the consideration phase.

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?

Keyword performance

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.

In order to obtain leads we have to obtain hundreds of visits to our landing page or web portal, but given the great algorithm changes and the volatility of the position of our rankings, it is important to pay special attention to:

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

evolution keywords

You can use SEMrush to see the evolution of the keywords of your web portal that you have positioned on page 1 and 2 of Google in recent months.

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. The first impression does count to improve SEO since if the user is not attracted by what he sees or reads in a few seconds, it is very likely that he will leave our page and with this we will obtain a very high bounce rate.

To avoid this, you must pay attention mainly to the featured image and the content of the first paragraph, since you must impact and hook the user so that they are interested in what they are seeing.

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

pages viewed

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

origin

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

With Google Analytics we will be able to obtain information such as:

  • Demographic data of our audience with data such as age and gender.
  • 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

mobile devices

It is essential to know how many users consult and read your content from mobile devices, since this is important to know if our website has a good responsive design.

User heat map

kpi indicator 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 which allows us to create a heat map of our web portal, and the second is Sumome, which we can see a heat map where visitors click. 

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. The number of visitors who become a customer and end their visit with a purchase or hiring of a service.

Cost per Lead

This KPI measures the effectiveness of our marketing campaign. This is very important because we have to quantify the cost or expense of our actions to divide it into total leads, and we can know how much this cost per lead meets.

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.

kpi on social media

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

KPI examples for 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.

kpi ecommerce google adwords facebook ads

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

social mention

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

How Sociable

how sociable

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

Ubervu

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

crowdbooster

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

Klear

twitrland

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

Audiense

socialbro

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

kpi wath dog

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

Simple KPI

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

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

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

Google Analytics kpi

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

I hope this post will be of great advantage to you so that you begin to establish your first KPI indicators, and include them in your marketing strategy. I recommend that you gradually introduce yourselves to each of the tools so that you can optimize their full potential.

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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