We’re continuing our KPI series and this time around, we’re focusing on the key marketing KPIs your business needs to track and measure.

KPIs help marketers to understand which products are selling, who’s buying them, how they’re buying them and why they’re buying them. This helps businesses to market more strategically, while informing product development.

There is no one size fits all approach as to which KPIs your company should track and measure over time. It depends on your business and its goals. While many sales and marketing KPIs overlap, you may find you’re not quite meeting your sales KPIs because you are not hitting your marketing KPIs. It’s not as confusing as it may seem! Many leads start as marketing leads first, before becoming sales leads – this makes marketing KPIs even more important.

 

MQLs versus SQLs: what’s the difference?

Marketing qualified leads (MQLs) are those that qualify as an attractive customer. Of course, this will depend on your business and industry but the process is the same. It’s wise to create a benchmark that tells you how effective your business is at transitioning leads to MQLs – track this over time so that you can see how you’re performing and adjust the definition of an MQL as needed. Once an MQL has an intent to make a purchase, it becomes a sales qualified lead (SQL). If you’re finding your business isn’t sourcing enough SQLs, it may be a sign that your offers/lead nurturing efforts aren’t hitting the mark with your target audience.

 

Cost per lead: one of your most important metrics!

Every business needs to monitor its cost per lead generated, aka, the cost of acquiring a new customer. It’s a pretty simple equation: time, plus money and resources spent on all marketing compared to the results in relation to the number of monthly leads you’re working with. Over time, you want to analyse the type of free and paid content that works for your business and focus more energy on the spaces that are bringing in the bacon!

Now, let’s turn our attention towards how we can measure leads with a number of common metrics.

 

Website KPIs

Your website is usually your customer’s first port of call so you need to actively track its success in helping your business to reach its KPIs. Google Analytics makes doing so simple and here some of the more important metrics to keep a keen eye on:

- Time on site

- Average session duration

- Bounce rate (how many people view your site after one page only)

- Page views per visit

All of the above tell you how engaging and easy it is to navigate around your website. The higher the time spent on-site, the better. You should generally see more time spent viewing blog content and landing pages, with minimal time spent by your customers going through the checkout process. If you have a high bounce rate, investigate why so many potential customers are leaving your site so quickly as opposed to exploring it properly. One possibility is your customers aren’t finding the journey rewarding because they can’t find what they’re looking for easily or fast enough because of your site’s navigation or layout.

When looking at your site, keep in mind:

  • How you’re using visual hierarchy so that customers can easily spot what’s most important and what isn’t as important
  • Remember that above the fold is important as this is where most visitors will spend their time so position what you want them to see most in this space
  • Make your navigation simple and clear so that people can find what they’re after quickly and easily
  • Be sure to answer people’s questions. The more clicking customers have to do, the more likely they are to bounce off your site without making a purchase
  • Use visual cues strategically to point customers towards the content you need them to see
  • Make sure your headings and labels are descriptive enough at first glance to guide people as to where they need to go to find what they’re after

Content is another factor: if it’s too hard to read due the site’s layout or is simply just not engaging enough, it’s not going to help keep people on your site longer.

Does your site check all of these boxes?

  • Font size and style is effective
  • Content isn’t just a wall of text
  • Jargon isn’t used and you’re speaking in your customer’s language
  • Content isn’t repeated over and over
  • Colour is used to highlight and point people to content you want them to read

 

Traffic

Traffic can help determine which pages your customers are viewing during their session on your site. Traffic generated by any product page tells you which of your products are gaining the most views/are the most popular. This helps you to plan out campaigns to highlight these products or trends – if you look at which customers are viewing what products, you can run targeted campaigns, which increase your chances at converting leads into sales.

Blog traffic is also helpful to measure as it can help to determine themes of content and products your audience are interested in so you can make most of your content. It’s also helpful to compare your blog traffic to overall site traffic to view what percentage it draws visitors to your site. 

 

Contact us page

Don’t ignore this page! If you’re finding a lot of people going to your contact page but not taking any action, always ask why. Remember, growing a successful business is all about building quality relationships so you want to hear from as many people as possible. Make it easy for people to reach out and navigate to your form or whatever else you’re using. Balance is important: you don’t want forms all over your site, use them selectively and where they’re most important. Keep your communication short and sharp.

 

Conversion forms

Converting unknown web visitors into leads can be done easily via conversion forms. You offer your customers something of value in exchange for their information. If you’re struggling to gain traction with your forms, it may be the offer doesn’t present itself well enough, you may be putting people off by asking for too much information or there is no perceived value, based on what has been communicated on your site elsewhere. Be open to A/B testing your forms as you’ll have better transparency over the messaging that works best with your target market.

 

Average position (SEO)

Looking for information about your site’s search engine optimisation (SEO) and paid search performance? Then this is the KPI you’re after as it tells you where your site ranks on search engine results pages, which is important as most retailers have the goal of being number one for their targeted keywords. If you notice SEO (organic search) is a low-cost source of leads when compared to pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, you will want to adjust your strategy by either increasing your investment in SEO or determining why PPC isn’t performing at a high enough level. Tools such as webmaster tools can help you to see which targeted keywords are directing the most traffic to your website so you know what content to leverage on or add to your AdWords account.

So, are you still with us? We know this is a fairly long list of KPIs but it really is so important for any ecommerce business to track and measure its online performance. Next month, we’ll look at marketing customer engagement and retention KPIs.

 

Need help setting up or better understanding any of the above KPIs? Contact our team today.