How to Evaluate Digital Marketing KPIs

Everybody wants results. Not everyone can prove them.

Whether a man in suspenders asks for your TPS report or a new fitness app measures our health progress, we measure our success on every job.

But data can be parsed any which way – it is not objective. So how do you determine what’s proving success? We sift through the graphs and digits to find out.

What is a KPI?

General business KPIs include:

• Sales
• Customer acquisition cost
• Customer lifetime value
• Cost per lead
• Customer satisfaction scores

They all ladder up to the big one – revenue.

Many businesses share KPIs, but numeric goals are unique to each company. A mom-and-pop’s KPIs shouldn’t match Walmart’s. KPIs should promote growth, but keep it real.

The common denominator is the number of customers driving overall revenue and profit goals. What does it take to keep the lights on and get extra money in your pocket? You want digital marketing to impact these KPIs and use metrics to prove it.

How KPIs Differ from Marketing Metrics

KPIs and marketing metrics can get conflated. Let’s break it down.

Digital marketing programs commonly track quarterly, monthly, weekly, and even daily metrics. The most common are:  

• Impressions: how many users see your link in search results
• Visits: how many users visit your website, and where did they come from
• Clicks: how many users click your campaign via SEO, paid, or other marketing channels
• Conversions: how many users take action such as a form fill, download, or video view  
• Conversion rate: conversions / total visitors x 100 = % 
• Customer acquisition cost: how much it costs to acquire each customer

And that’s just scratching the surface.

The digital marketing KPI that matters most is quality leads and buyers. This metric is the most significant indicator of marketing success. Why?

One word: Revenue. 

What are Leading and Lagging Metrics?

To further confuse you, there are two types of metrics. Leading metrics look forward to potential outcomes. Lagging metrics look back for insights. Let’s clarify.

Metrics like queries, views, keyword rankings and clicks are leading metrics that give you trends. It’s potential. These metrics provide user behavior progress. They don’t always indicate the final lead or buyer total. They can tell marketers to “keep calm and carry on” or “let’s rethink this,” but ultimately they help marketers understand their audience better.

That all-important lead and buyer metric is, unfortunately, lagging. Lagging metrics take time to achieve and are inherently historical. We look at leading metrics to understand what lagging metrics will look like. At the end of a set time period, we look at lagging metrics to see their impacts on the business.

Metrics for User Behavior

The number of quality leads and buyers reveals that many mainstay leading metrics, like impressions and site visits, don’t always indicate progress. For instance, a company could have increasing site visits, but leads stagnate. Or a company sees a dip in site visits but a rise in leads.

Do you panic? The reason could be targeting through user behavior. This is a good thing.

We all want to be data-driven marketers. Metrics teach us about our customers, which we can turn around to create effective targeting strategies. Metrics can decide the appropriate cost per click or peak times to run ads. What often happens, though, is that we add benchmarks.

Digital Marketing Benchmarks

To make it harder, marketers may add benchmarks to their plans. Benchmarks are a number you look to hit as your baseline. They can be based off industry standards or previous years’ progress.

But here’s where things go wrong: benchmarking typically leads to unrealistic expectations. There are nuances to your organization and the ever-shifting market that these benchmarks don’t take into account. More importantly, is that number relevant to KPI progress?

A lagging or historical metric might not cover seasonality, supply chain changes, economy fluctuations, or Google algorithm updates. It’s good to know how things are going year over year, but that historical context is needed before anything is dubbed a success or failure.

These metrics and benchmarks are not KPIs. They are best used as a source of user behavior to track the bigger picture. Understanding these measurements of user behavior, and comparing progress to your business KPIs, helps whittle down to the metrics that matter.

The Metrics that Matter

How do you manage expectations and evaluate success using KPIs, metrics, and benchmarks? It’s about simplification; in this case, seeing is believing. What’s happening now that will pay off later?

We have four steps for evaluating digital marketing success today.

Step 1: Are You Showing Up in Searches? How?

Manually comb the search landscape using the keywords and terms you want to target. Then ask yourself, are you there? If so, great! How?

This isn’t just to take rank, which is essential – some tools track that for you. In this case, it’s about putting yourself in your customer’s shoes. What do they see? Where do you stand in terms of your competition? This visual brings meaning to your tool’s numerical data and metrics and clarifies your overall SEO and paid media success.

Step 2: Evaluate Search Queries

Now you can work to understand your search traffic by assessing search queries. With an understanding of your users and their searches, try thinking like your customers and look at other search queries. Are there areas you missed? Third-party tools can also help with suggesting alternative / tertiary keywords with search intent and decent search volume. 

Step 3: Evaluate Leads

The third step is the most important: evaluating your leads and buyers. LOOP Analytics makes this easy by providing form data, touchpoints, and other valuable information about these users. 

Are you seeing quality leads or irrelevant form-fills from cleaning services or other vendors? Those. are. the. worst. The metric for total form-fills means little if there are few actual leads.

Also, who is buying? How many pages do they visit? What channels drive them to the site? Each user journey offers insight into your customer base to utilize in your marketing efforts.

Step 4: Review SEO Trends

Finally, look at the SEO trends of these users reaching lead or buyer status. Do they match up with what you see in steps one and two? Customer journeys tell us what’s working, keywords to consider, and touchpoints to lean into. 

Metrics tell the story of how you achieve revenue. This exercise can help manage KPI expectations and reveal the metrics that matter by keeping your eye on the prize—what turns users into customers.