Making Sense of Marketing KPIs and Metrics

When it comes to measuring our marketing impact we already know we need to start with goals. Creating SMART goals – ones that are Specific Measurable Actionable Realistic are even better. But once those goals are established marketers need to make sure we are able to accurately measure these goals to indicate results and performance. Defining the correct Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs, and metrics will ensure you and your team have a streamlined process.

KPIs vs Metrics

Remember the saying “all squares are rectangles, but not all rectangles are squares”? This applies to KPIs and metrics. All KPIs are metrics, but not all metrics are KPIs. Examples of metrics include visits to your website, adds to shopping cart, purchases, bounce rate, new vs returning visitors. Metrics are valuable when assessing the performance of your marketing, but they do not necessarily provide in-depth insights into the performance of your brand. KPIs provide more insights into high-level brand goals. For example, purchases on a website would be considered a metric. It is important to know how many products consumers are buying, but that doesn’t really tell you very much about your brand. A key performance indicator would be something like purchases per hundred visits to your website – that gives you more insight into your brand goals and performance.

Identifying KPIs and Metrics

When your team decides what indicators to measure, keep in mind the high-level marketing goals for your brand. An example of a high-level marketing goal can be increased brand engagement on social media. Some metrics that could be used to measure that would be post clicks, likes, comments, shares, and page follows. Social media KPIs could also include factors like relevancy score. Because Facebook uses a variety of factors like who is clicking off the posts, how long users interact with the post, and if users are responding positively or negatively to the posts to measure relevancy, it would be considered a KPI.

Measuring Marketing
Once your team has identified the metrics and KPIs that they will track to gauge performance, it is time to gather the analytics. Tools like Google Analytics, Facebook for Business, and Twitter analytics can provide metrics for your campaigns. Generally the analytics tools provided by the native platforms themselves are a great option, they are designed to measure the best data that relates to their products. There are also benefits to using third party platforms as well. Third party platforms may allow you to see metrics from different platforms at the same time, or allow you to see comparisons beyond with the native platforms allow. Using services like DashThis or SocialBakers to gather data on social media interactions can provide new insight into your data. DashThis is a useful tool that allows marketers to plug data from your tracking platforms directly into your account to create dashboard of your analytics that automatically updates.