Marketers know that the ability to measure success online is far more accurate than measurements offline. Tracking, analyzing and responding to the data is your key to success. Begin by defining the key performance indicators, or KPIs, for your campaigns.
With your marketing goals in mind, what is measurable? As Friends with Benefits: A Social Media Marketing Handbook notes, social media’s goals are about increasing online visibility. This means creating awareness about your products, services and brand. When determining metrics, think of actions that indicate people are aware of your brand and, from these actions, what is measurable.
The development process for KPIs can be visualized as a funnel:
Goal > Action > Measurement (KPI)
Web Stats To Measure
KPIs linked to product and brand awareness should focus on visits your website and how they found it. Are people aware of, and visiting, your site? If they are, how did they get there and were they aware of your brand before they visited? The following is a list of web stats that can help gage awareness about your product and brand.
- Unique Visitors. This shows how many people are visiting your website.
- Direct Traffic. This shows how many people are coming directly to your site by typing the URL in their address bar. These visitors are coming to the site having already heard about your product or brand.
- Referral Traffic. This shows where your visitors are coming from. This is important because referrals are like recommendations. You will want to build a relationship with the sites that are directing traffic to your site.
- Keyword traffic. This shows how people are finding your site. Are they using your brand’s keywords? This shows that they already knew about you before they visited your site. What other keywords are visitors using? If familiar keywords are seen month over month, then it shows a strong interest in a topic or category, which you may want to profile on the home page. Trending keywords should also be used in your site’s content, for example, as blog posts and page titles, in order to capitalize on new traffic sources.
With these KPIs, you can create a KPI scorecard. Fill in the scorecard monthly and go back over previous months to determine a baseline. Looking at the numbers month over month, are they the same? Where do they fluctuate? What does this mean in relation to your marketing activities? What should be repeated, modified, or discarded for something new?
