Digital Marketing KPI’s and How to Prioritize Based on Them

Why collect ‘Key Performance Indicators’ – KPI’s for your digital marketing efforts? Well, if you determine the right one’s – the one’s that affect the traffic to your website and conversions / contact forms / sales, you can create a brief one page document that lays out these key pieces of data so high-level people in the organization can see where you’re at and trends/shifts at a glance.

This one-page document only matters inasmuch as people are taking responsibility for the numbers, making shifts to improve the numbers and know why the numbers matter.

For me the key numbers on a new web design company, or marketing agency are:

• Page-views
• Conversion Rate
• Number of Conversions – Number of conversions that equal qualified leads. This is the NUMBER ONE MOST IMPORTANT KPI to me, and all of my marketing efforts will be based around it, and my priorities guided by it.
• Won business / Sales
• Direct from website new business / sales

Previous 3 month timeframe of the same numbers.

Secondarily – metrics that indicate where the organization is at with organic website traffic – with traffic from Google and other search engines.

• High value – Keyword on search engines that bring in high returns  – 3 month trend – are we going up or down? Because digital marketing clients so often come from search traffic this is the number two guiding light for all of my initiatives.
• What is the nine month outlook  – graphical tend – on the amount of organic traffic.
• What is the nine month outlook – graphical trend –  on the amount of keywords we’re ranking for?
• Page-views, conversions and conversion rate comparing the same time frame from last year?
• Page-views, conversions and conversion rate comparing the entire year, vs. the same period the year before.

The first step is getting all of this out onto a one page document with the couple of very clear priorities – I’ve bolded mine above – towards the top. Then you keep the people that can make shifts; mobilizing content, changing design in development to close up issues in the user experience, and enable sales people with important supporting material to increase the overall close rate of new business.

I’ve recently done this for my organization and the only two things I used to get all of this out (besides leadership for sales numbers,) and include visual graphs is:

• Google Analytics – to get page views, conversions and conversion rates
• Ahref’s Lite – to get clear graphs for key terms to screenshot

Google Analytics of course is a very crucial element of any marketer’s tool-box, the two views I used to get screenshots for my one-pager (actually around 2 with auxillary graphs) are the Conversions Overview (you have to have set up conversions), and Behavior > Site Content > All Pages. Ahref’s is a delightful tool that you can use to get solid data (in conjunction with search console) about where you’re at in search engine results pages; I use the position’s explorer, and tracked keywords to get quick info about where we’re at.

Of course your KPI’s may be different, but getting what they are hammered out and onto something you can share with people in your organization can bring organizational self-awareness, and in the hands of the right people enable them to make movements that can make the organization more money and help you connect with people that need your products and services.

Now you’ll need to take each of your marketing initiative and order them by the weight of these KPI’s

I find it helpful to get all of my main projects and list them out with the next nitty gritty step that I need to take get it done, and what my preferred conclusion would be – a successful outcome, and then I order them by what will make the biggest difference. For me that means how to get qualified leads, and how to get key terms higher on Google for the services we want to sell. So the steps are:

1. Get clear on what your KPI’s are and which ones are the most important for you
2. Take your initiatives that you have (like blogging, or an adwords push, or a new website) and order those weighted towards the most important KPI’s.
3. Keep track of progress over time and make clear number based goals with a date.
4. Count your money and laugh maniacally.

I wish you luck on your journey to key in on your number one most important KPI, very clear ideas on what the others are, and your priorities adjusted to match. Thanks for reading.