KPIs for marketing you need to know

If you were a fly on a wall in a marketing meeting, we’re confident the term ‘KPI’ would come up a few times. But, without context, KPIs can be confusing — to both seasoned executives and their fly colleagues. There are many reasons why you should wrap your head around KPIs, but the most important one is that they help businesses gauge their marketing performance relative to their strategic goals.

This guide will highlight the indicators all levels and types of marketers should pay attention to.

What are KPIs for marketing?

Marketing KPIs, or Key Performance Indicators, are quantifiable metrics used to evaluate the performance of a marketing strategy. In easier-to-understand terms, they measure the success of marketing efforts, validating progress and providing valuable feedback.

While there are dozens of KPIs for marketing, the three most widespread are:

• Sales revenue, or the profits that come from your marketing efforts.
• Cost per lead, or your total spend to attract new customers.
• Traffic-to-lead ratio, or the number of leads you’ve generated against your traffic volume.

Different KPIs are also used in content marketing, social media marketing, digital marketing and many more roles, which we’ll delve further into below.

What’s the difference between OKRs and KPIs?

Like OKRs (Objectives and Key Results), good KPIs are meaningful, align with a brand’s direction and are SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-Bound). They’re a stable set of measures that allow you to observe short- and long-term marketing progress. OKRs, however, change quarterly and align to a specific objective rather than department.

It’s easy to confuse the two, but the most important thing to remember is that the purposes of OKRs and KPIs are different. While KPIs monitor the health of your business, OKRs strengthen specific areas of your business.

What are some examples of KPIs for marketing campaigns?

The marketing KPIs you track will vary depending on your department. Each team has a different role to play, which means they also have different KPIs to observe. A social media coordinator will look at impressions and clicks, whereas a content marketer will focus on page views. PR specialists will monitor brand mentions and SEO managers hone in on organic traffic.

Let’s break it down further.

KPIs for digital marketing

Here are a few KPIs to evaluate your digital marketing campaign’s progress:

1. Traffic — The total number of visitors who engaged with your content or visited your website over a period of time.
2. Conversions — A conversion is when a visitor takes a desired action on your website (typically a purchase).
3. CPC and CPL — Cost per click (CPC) and cost per lead (CPL) are similar; however, the former specifies your cost for each click on your ads and the latter how much you pay to attract customers.

Examples of KPIs for digital marketing

• Decrease cost per click by 10% by EOFY
• Boost website visitors to 50,000 a month

KPIs for email marketing

To monitor your email marketing campaigns, here are some baseline KPIs to track:

1. Open rate — A measurement of the number of people who open your eDMs.
2. Click-through rate (CTR) — CTR refers to the number of clicks on an email compared against opens.
3. Subscribers — Whether it’s your subscribe or unsubscribe rate, it’s important to keep numbers looking positive.
4. Revenue — This is the number and value of conversions generated by your email marketing campaign.

Examples of KPIs for email marketing

• Increase email click-through rate by 2% month-on-month
• Get 3,000 new email subscribers by the end of the year

KPIs for content marketing

Here are a few essential KPIs to help track the progress of your content marketing campaigns:

1. Time on page — How long visitors spend on your page in seconds.
2. Visitors — This is the number of visitors on your page, helping you determine whether your content is performing well.
3. Traffic acquisition channels — Whether traffic is generated through PPC campaigns, social media, backlinks, search engines or more.

Examples of KPIs for content marketing

• Increase organic traffic from 1,000 to 1,500 visitors a month
• Improve average time spent on the page by 30% by EOFY

KPIs for social media marketing campaigns

These KPIs can help you measure your social media marketing success:

1. Impressions — The number of people your post is reaching.
2. Subscriber count — How many people subscribe to your social media channels and the rate at which that number grows.
3. Engagement — How many times is your content shared? How many times is a post clicked on?

Examples of KPIs for social media marketing

• Obtain 1,000 new Instagram followers by the end of the month
• Increase social media leads by 50% by the end of the year

KPIs for influencer marketing

Here is a selection of core KPIs to track the progress of influencer marketing campaigns:

1. Audience growth  — The number of followers gained and whether that impacted brand awareness.
2. Referral traffic — The number of visitors who come to your site via a custom link used by influencers.
3. Sales — Campaign performance via conversion rate and revenue generated.

Examples of KPIs for influencer marketing

• Get product reviewed by 10 industry experts on social media by EOFY
• Double influencer referral traffic from 500 to 1,000 leads per month

Should marketers use OKRs or KPIs?

So, should you use OKRs or KPIs in marketing? Like any proud parent, we can’t choose. Both systems are successful and collaborative when implemented well. Knowing your organisation’s KPIs will make OKRs-setting easier, as there are many similarities between Key Results and KPIs. The OKRs framework can level up KPIs by enforcing regular check-ins to keep track of progress.

OKRs software like Tability will improve the visibility of your marketing efforts and allow you to track your objectives, key results and KPIs in one place. Take a test drive and try Tability for free today.

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