Avoid getting lost in dozens of irrelevant reports and losing focus on your marketing project’s key factors. Knowing how to identify key performance indicators (KPI’s) will help you extract the data you require to properly frame your project’s performance.
webcastingandvirtualevents.com gathered the following information about key performance indicators, determining which metrics are your KPI’s providing the highest and most appropriate value to your marketing strategy or event.
What Are KPI’s
Key performance indicators are a set of metrics that reflect the most relevant outcomes of an event, marketing strategy, or running comparison (A/B test). Any metric may be designated a KPI, so how do you determine which metrics will be used as key performance indicators?
Consider this; During a follow-up exam (after being diagnosed with high blood pressure), which metrics are more valuable to your doctor? Measuring your height or taking your current blood pressure reading?
Your height may be used in conjunction with your weight to determine an eventual plan or diet (this is a metric), but your blood pressure reading will offer immediate, essential treatment information (this is the KPI).
In the beginning phases of your marketing strategy or event planning, you should determine which metrics you intend to gather. These metrics may include:
- Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL)
- Sales Qualified Leads (SQL)
- Cost Per Lead
- Referral Traffic
- Organic Traffic
- Customer Transaction Value
- Lifetime Value of a Customer (LTV)
- Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
- Customer Engagement
- Customer Retention
- Conversion Rates
- Return on Investment (ROI)
- Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)
- Sales Revenue
- Brand Awareness
- Event Enrollment
- Event Attendance
- How Long Event Attendees Stayed
- Repeat/Return Attendance
Once you determine which metrics to collect, you can designate a set of these metrics as your KPI’s. If you are planning a virtual event, you may find “event enrollment,” “event attendance,” and “conversion rates” carry more immediate value than the “lifetime value of a customer.”
The bottom line of any marketing strategy should be to increase your ROI. KPI’s are used for problem-solving, decision making, and project/program optimization to do just that.
Data Analytics Tools
Data collection is vital to understanding and growing a business. There is no shortage of software that collects, organizes, and presents this information for you. When determining the metrics and KPI’s you wish to track, consider the following software options:
Google Analytics – This service allows you to analyze in-depth detail about visitors to your website. This software offers valuable insights that can help you shape the strategy of your business.
Statcounter – This web analytics tool is a simple but powerful real-time service that helps track, analyze, and understand your website’s visitor actions.
RapidMiner – This software allows data mining, text mining, and predictive analytics. RapidMiner also allows raw data entry, including databases and text, which is then automatically analyzed on a large scale.
Microsoft Power BI – This software is an interactive data visualization and analytics tool for business intelligence (BI). It can pull data from a range of systems in the cloud or on-premises to create dashboards that track metrics or allows you to ask questions about your data.
Tip: Most data analytics software offers a free version or trial period, allowing you to test the software and find one that best collects the data your marketing team needs.
KPI Examples
Key performance indicators are everywhere. The type of event or marketing strategy you are promoting will generally determine the metrics used as your KPI’s. Consider the following:
Direct Mail Campaign – When conducting a direct mail campaign, conversion rates will ultimately influence the campaign’s success or failure. However, your KPI’s may be the number of calls or unique (new) website visits resulting from the mailer.
Grocery Store Samples – When introducing a new product or attempting to increase sales of an existing product, grocery stores may offer that product prepared and portioned into samples. Two potential KPI’s for this strategy include:
- Number of product used vs. number of sales
- Product sales (quantity or percentage increase)
Restaurant Promotions – In times of social distancing and a dramatic reduction in in-person dining, determining KPI’s for a restaurant’s marketing campaign is more important than ever. Some of those KPI’s may include:
- In which timeframes people are ordering
- Which dining apps are customers using
- Which meals, sides, and drinks are the most popular
These metrics help restaurants determine staffing levels, menu content, and even hours of operation.
Email Marketing Campaign – These campaigns offer multiple measurable metrics. KPI’s may include:
- Conversion Rate
- Clickthrough Rate
- Bounce Rate
- Open Rate
- Unsubscribe Rate
These metrics provide valuable insight into the reach and effectiveness of your campaign, and the engagement of your subscribers.
Key Performance Indicators
In this article, you discovered valuable insight and information about key performance indicators, how to identify them amongst other metrics, and what value they represent.
Knowing how to determine your project’s KPI’s allows you to collect valuable data that helps solve problems, make informed decisions, and optimize your marketing event or project.
By not defining your project’s KPI’s, you may be giving undue attention to metrics that won’t provide data necessary for improvements and modifications.
Sources:
ie.edu/insights/articles/measure-before-deciding-the-essence-of-data-in-marketing/
sloanreview.mit.edu/article/five-categories-to-focus-your-kpis/
crm.org/news/best-data-analytics-tools
knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/marketing-metrics-and-financial-performance/
marshall.edu/2020/files/KPI-MUBOG-Retreat-2014_10_31.pdf
See https://webcastingandvirtualevents.com/kpis-measuring-performance-marketing/ for the first version of this content.
