KPIs (Key Performance Indicators)

A KPI represents a number companies use to measure the effectiveness of their marketing, sales, and other departments. KPI metrics go beyond simple sales numbers and consider information like brand awareness, social media reach, and website interaction. Often, marketers report on their KPIs monthly, weekly or quarterly.

By reporting these metrics consistently, marketers are able to see how their efforts effect overall business. There are several different KPIs for several different types of marketing.

You can measure KPIs for email marketing efforts through CTR (click-through rates), conversion rates, CTOR (click-to-open rates), ROI (return on investment), open rates, and bounce rates. These are all metrics that measure how effective your sends are when it comes to engaging with subscribers. You can improve these rates by testing content, personalizing your emails, segmenting your sends, and automating your campaigns. These are all steps you can take inside the Campaign Monitor’s email marketing software platform.

For social media, your measurements might take other KPIs into account: impressions, click-through rates, social shares, and engagement. To improve these measurements, consider posting consistent, helpful content at a dependable cadence and engage with your followers.

If you’re measuring the success of digital ads, you might measure CPC (cost-per-click), CPM (cost-per-thousand), and lead-to-close ratio. Ads can be tricky, so be sure to read up on placement, heat maps, and keywords.

If you’re measuring KPIs for email, social, or digital ads, you likely have a website. Luckily, there are KPIs you can measure on your website as well. Some of the standard website KPIs are: bounce rates (different from email bounces), time-on-site and pages-per-visit, and cart abandonment.

Naturally, your business will likely have several more KPIs specific to your industry. If downloads and site traffic are a big part of your revenue, you’ll naturally want to measure those closely as well.