KPIs in Digital Marketing: how to manage them

The digital market is evolving fast and offers new opportunities to create successful businesses. For this reason, there are more and more companies that are willing to launch themselves into the competition through a D2C model and without the need for intermediaries. 

So for those who feel ready to jump into the market on their own, we have compiled this article the KPIs that you need to look at to understand how your brand is actually doing. 

Digital marketing offers vast tools, channels and strategies that you can trigger for your business to grow and succeed. 

It is normal to feel overwhelmed by such a large amount of variety and lose focus on what really matters for our business. 

Learn the most valuable KPIs for your businesses and some tips to take the best out of every strategy. 

Website KPIs

So let’s start from your most important ally for D2C brands - your website - you need to make sure that your website is on point to attract your consumers and make your product easy to access. But, how can you know if your marketing is empowering your website? 

• Monthly web traffic: Your website traffic is a great indicator to understand if your marketing strategy is going as good as you need for shoppers to click on links, CTAs and Ads. If you want to nail your website and increase its traffic, make sure that it is well SEO optimised to boost organic visitors and CTAs drive to key pages. 

Moreover, the number of pages visited and the average time on page can also help you understand if your website traffic is good enough to achieve your goals.

• Cart Abandonment rate: It is crucial to understand the reasons behind your cart abandonment rate and trigger a strategy to minimasi its negative impact. Look after your pages optimisation, prepare a cart abandonment email strategy and include some retargeting ads within your digital marketing strategy. 
• Number of returning vs new visitors: a high number of returning compared to your new visitors is a very positive KPI. It reveals the engagement level of your target audience 
• Website conversion rate: catchy CTAs, an easy navigation and a stunning visual design will boost your website conversion rates. Just remember to update your website, optimise your checkout points, look after the load timing and make your website mobile friendly to guarantee an amazing website conversion rate. 

Social Media KPIs

Social media channels are crucial to build an effective digital marketing strategy. The KPIs that will help you understand how is your social media presence doing are: 

• Engagement Rate: When it comes to social media, the higher your engagement rate, the larger is your reach. There are different way to measure your social media engagement rate, but typically, companies focus on shares, likes, clicks and comments. If you want to succeed on social media, remember to create targeted social media campaigns, ensure that your posts match your target’s audience interests, desires and habits and, create genuinely valuable content which includes questions and ways to open conversation, boost engagement and sharing. 
• Mentions: You’d know if you’re doing good on social media if you get a lot of mentions. Mentions are an amazing way to track both positive and negative reactions to your product or service. 

A great way to boost your mentions is by thanking positive feedbacks and answering your negative ones. 

• Social media traffic: monitor all your web traffic coming from social media to understand if your posts are contributing to your sales and revenue indeed. 

Take your social media traffic to the next level by creating promotional campaigns, and CTAs on your social posts and experiment with social shopping. 

Email marketing KPIs.

Email marketing is still one of the strongest digital marketing strategies to grow your business. These are the KPIs that will help you understand how your emails are doing:

• Subscribe Rate: not only indicates that your website is killing it for encouraging people to subscribe, but it also means you can spread your marketing messages more widely. 

To boost your subscribe rate, remember to reduce the clicks required to subscribe and add some discounts or other exclusive perks within your sign-up form.  

• Open Rate: If you achieve a great open rate, that means that your emails are effectively built and sent, in a way that they are catchy for your contacts at the same time that they provide relevant information for them. Just make sure that you don’t neglect  your unsubscribe rate and spam complaints. 
• Click-through Rate: Emails should be a key ally to drive customers to products, promotions and further actions related to your brand. A positive click-through rate means that you are achieving such a purpose by your email marketing. 
• Conversion Rate from emails: Make sure that your customer’s journey is well tracked from your emails to the conversion point to understand the volume of sales coming from your email communications.

SEO KPIs

They are also crucial for brands to understand how their digital marketing is doing and you should pay special attention to:

• Organic Search Traffic: organic search is a classic! One of the most popular ways to find the answer about almost everything related to your SEO optimisation and digital marketing strategy. However, its popularity has made it very challenging for brands to lead on the search engine result pages (SERP) and, if you are experiencing a low traffic from organic search, it is time to improve your SEO optimisation. For example, you can double check your keyword strategy and make sure that you choose to rank highly for the targeted keywords that can turn search into conversion; include SEO audits to empower your website, add new content and optimise your existing content. 
• Inbound Links to a website: Inbound links to your website is a crucial KPI to perform in the search engine results. The more inbound links you have from sites with high page authority, the better your site will perform in search engine results. 

To empower your Inbound Links, you can partner-up with some leaders and relevant people from your industry and integrate some content exchange in your strategy or pen guest posts.

Ecommerce KPIs

When it comes to ecommerce we have three top KPIs which are key to understanding how good your digital marketing is performing. 

• Conversion Rate: this is the top KPI for ecommerce websites. It will help you understand if you entire business strategy is succeeding in driving people to engage with your ecommerce website. 
• Customer Lifetime Value: attention must be paid to your customer lifetime value since it is the most important KPI to track. It’s definitely the KPI that will help you measure the overall success of an ecommerce business by reflecting in it other key values such as conversion rate, average order value and return customer rate. 
• Customer retention rate: this KPI will help you understand the long term success of your business. By monitoring your customer retention rate, you will know if your customers are coming back to purchase more of your product and what might make them stay or leave your ecommerce site. 

Make sure that you provide amazing customer care, integrate a post-purchase follow up email strategy and respond to all negative feedback. 

Paid Ads KPIs

Paid advertising is a big ally to generate more traffic, leads and conversion when it goes well. For example, if you experience a low click-through rate, your ads are being seen and ignored. The KPIs that will show you how’s you paid Ads strategy doing are: 

• Average cost per lead: acquiring leads can be a piece of cake but acquiring affordable leads is art! A list of costs including the time spent managing a lead acquisition source (e.g., social media, blog, Google Ads campaign) and the cost associated with the lead acquisition source (includes relevant resources and tools) can blow up your cost per lead. 

To avoid this, we recommend you to experiment with organic social media, make sure you’re reaching the right audience at the right time with your marketing campaigns and monitor your marketing funnel as a whole — each touchpoint should work seamlessly with one another.

• Conversion from paid advertising: for marketers it is a nightmare when shoppers click on paid ads and then for any reason they don’t convert and luckily there are some smooth ways to avoid such a waste of budget and a low conversion rate. - You can include keywords with lower competition for your keyword strategy, A/B test your ads (copy, images, etc) and CTAs and optimise your landing pages. 

Last thoughts

• It is crucial to understand the KPIs that are more relevant for your business model since there are tons of KPIs and it would be impossible to kill it in every single one.
• Now that you know them, don’t stress out yourself by nailing all of them, but decide the ones that are more convenient for your digital marketing strategy and business goals. 
• Make sure that after choosing your KPIs allies, you’ll rely on the experts that can help you succeed. 
• Detect the weaknesses of your KPIs and implement the right solutions

Do frequent KPIs audits to minimise a big mess or loss in your digital marketing strategy.