Improve Your Campaigns With These Critical KPIs

Not long ago, we explored four primary key performance indicators (KPIs) to improve your digital marketing campaigns.

In the Age of Information, data reigns supreme. But this wealth of digital insights, readily available at the click of a button, is only effective if you use it wisely. And as you’ll have learned, KPIs play a pivotal role in shaping your analytical efforts.

By working with KPIs, you’ll be able to omit irrelevant datasets with ease while setting goals to measure the success of your marketing efforts in several critical areas, accurately.

Now we’re going to revisit each of these four core KPIs, offering practical solutions for improving your campaign initiatives if you have identified a need for improvement in organic search visibility, website or landing page conversion rates, the cost-per-click (CPC) of paid advertising, and your overall return on marketing investment (ROMI).

“Without a systematic way to start and keep data clean, bad data will happen.” Donato Diorio

1. Organic searches

Around 40,000 search queries are punched into Google each second. These commands equate to 3.5 billion searches per day or 1.2 trillion searches annually.

By improving your organic search visibility, you stand to boost brand awareness, expand your commercial reach and, ultimately, increase your bottom line.

If you’ve noticed a drop in organic search traffic through tracking the relevant KPI metrics, here are the approaches you can take to make vital improvements:

• Refine your content marketing strategy and when planning your assets, ensure you strive for originality over all else. Even the slightest sniff of plagiarism could hurt your SEO efforts and have a negative impact on your organic search rankings. So innovate, inspire - and be original.

• Now more than ever, consumers expect a flawless level of user experience (UX) from brands. A poor page loading time can hurt your credibility, as well as your organic page rankings. So, ensure your page loading speed is optimized by removing irrelevant content, code and functionality from your website (and any other relevant touchpoints).

• Target local keywords to optimize your content for niche audiences and drill down further into this SEO-centric metric to gain a deeper insight into your performance and strategic efforts.

2. Website or landing page conversion rate

Despite the prevalence of mobile devices, a mere 50% of all landing pages are mobile-optimized. This is a startling statistic when you consider there are more mobile devices in the world than humans.

The point here is that primary website landing pages are crucial to attracting users and encouraging conversions. If your conversion-rate-related KPIs are telling you that particular pages within your website are underperforming, you’ll need to take immediate action.

Here are three initiatives you can take to boost your web or landing page conversion rates:

• Use A/B split testing to compare landing page tweaks, enhancements and functionality to understand the elements that yield the best results while resonating most with your target audience.

• Mix, muddied or convoluted landing pages can have a detrimental effect on your conversion rates. That said, you should narrow your focus by having one clear-cut action and CTA for each landing page. Doing do will increase your landing page’s UX and drive your users towards your desired outcome.

Expanding on the previous point, to boost your landing page conversion rates, you should utilize directional cues. Landing pages should be 100% navigable as well as scan-able, and by using elements like bold CTA buttons, arrows pointing users to particular parts of your page, or accentuated phrases such as ‘look here’ or ‘try it for free’, you will see your conversions increase over time.

3. Cost per click (CPC)

Paid advertising is an integral part of every digital marketer’s toolkit. Recent studies suggest that 63% of consumers confirm they would click on a Google ad if it appeared on a search engine results page (SERPs). Moreover, 41% of clicks are rewarded to the top three paid ads on a given search results page.

There are many paid advertising avenues available to today’s marketers, most of which have one aspect in common: the lower your CPC, the more effective your campaign will become.

If you’ve consulted your KPIs but your CPC metrics are getting out of control, here are some methods you can try to reduce them.

• Leverage negative keywords that have a lower bidding rate, less competition and which stand a greater chance of your ad being triggered by irrelevant keywords, costing you unnecessary ad budget as a result.

• Take the time to understand every aspect of Google Ads on a deeper level and you’ll be able to create PPC campaigns that are far more streamlined, results-driven, and economical.

The Quality Score is Google’s rating system relating to the relevance of your keywords, landing page and advertisements. Do not ignore it. If you maintain a consistently solid score, you will boost your ad rankings and reduce your CPC levels.

4. Return on marketing investment (ROMI)

As you may well know, your ROMI is one of the most important campaign KPIs you’ll ever track. Every activity you undertake will affect the success of your marketing return on investment (ROI), so of course, the higher the ROI, the better.

If you after analyzing your ROMI over a set timeframe, you started to identify significant inefficiencies, here are three specific KPIs that will help you tackle the issue at the source:

• Response rate: This is an excellent KPI for helping to improve your overall ROMI as by tracking the responses to particular campaign initiatives, offers and communications, you’ll be able to understand what works best, what doesn’t and how to streamline your efforts on a ‘micro level’.

• Reach: If your content, activities and communications are not connecting with a healthy number of target consumers, you’re ultimately wasting valuable time and resources on your marketing efforts. That said, measuring your reach will allow you to make vital improvements in key areas of your marketing activities and set benchmarks for future campaigns. As a guide, a 60% reach rate is a successful benchmark metric.

• Dollars/Pounds/Euros generated: An essential monetary KPI, this is a metric you should track closely to understand the level of profit generated from particular campaigns, marketing channels, and touchpoints. If you identify a channel where you’re spending a notable amount of time and resources but which isn’t generating much revenue, you’ll be able to create initiatives to solve the problem, increasing your ROMI in the process.

“Data that is loved tends to survive.” Kurt Bollacker

Through setting definitive goals for your marketing campaigns, measuring your success with the right metrics, and understanding how to tackle rising issues or refine your efforts, you will enjoy a wealth of long-term digital marketing success. Explore these essential KPIs, use these tips for reference and you’ll notice a significant improvement to your initiatives in no time. Best of luck!