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What KPIs should you use for digital marketing?

As a marketing director or marketing manager, the question of KPIs often arises. For example, a CEO or board of directors may ask what KPIs you have set or what KPIs you should set.It is not always easy to keep track of which KPIs are relevant and what they mean.In this blog post, we will go into some depth about KPIs and how you can think when working with your performance monitoring of your digital marketing activities.First of all, we need to explain what a KPI is.

What is a CPI?

KPI is an abbreviation of Key Performance Indicator and can also be called a key performance indicator.It should be a number that describes how a particular activity or function is performing. Therefore, it is important that a KPI can be easily measured and, above all, understood.A KPI should also be measurable over time and therefore comparable with each other so that it is easy for stakeholders to understand whether the function they want to measure is getting better or worse.Examples of KPIs that can be used in digital marketing are

  • Number of visitors to the website
  • Number of converting leads
  • Cost per Click (often linked to advertising)
  • Cost per lead
  • Number of followers on social media
  • Number of blog posts written in a month

There is a wide range of different types of KPIs to use and work with. It's almost overwhelming and it creates problems.If you report on 50 KPIs every month it will take time away from you, from the person reading (if they have time to read at all) and above all it's often not relevant to have so many KPIs.

Why measure KPIs?

Measuring KPIs is extremely important for everyone! It's not just in digital marketing, everyone has certain goals or outcomes that are worth measuring and tracking. Take for example the cashier in the checkout at Coop - where it is very relevant how many customers that person can serve per hour or per day. Not only to keep track of how good that person is compared to the other cashiers, but also for planning the staffing of the store - just as it is relevant to know how many customers the cashier can handle per hour to plan how the store should schedule its staff and how many cashiers there need to be at any given time. KPIs in digital marketing should also be able to inform decisions (we will go into this in more detail in the next section).It is important that you are able to use KPIs to show your managers or board that you are on the right track or taking steps in the right direction.In digital marketing, it is especially important to use KPIs to show that the budget spent on marketing is actually profitable. In other words, that there is an ROI from the activities that are carried out.

What do you want from your KPIs?

We touched on it briefly in the above paragraph that it is important that KPIs can be used as a basis for decision-making.If you want to be able to decide which social media is the most profitable for you to spend time on, you should reflect on which KPI you need to determine this.It could be "leads from Facebook vs Leads from LinkedIn" or "Cost per lead on Facebook" and "Cost per lead on LinkedIn"If you use these two options of KPIs, these do not necessarily show the same results. It may be that these KPIs are contradictory, e.g. if the number of leads from Facebook is 10 and Leads from LinkedIn is 4 but the cost per lead on Facebook is 3000 SEK per lead compared to LinkedIn where the cost is 2000 SEK per lead.For this very reason, it is extremely important to find out what it is you are looking for and what is important to you and your organization when it comes to digital marketing.If a lead is worth SEK 10,000, it may not matter so much if the cost is a little higher on Facebook, but if the leads are only worth SEK 2,900, it is a negative business to continue the activities on Facebook while LinkedIn still has value.

Same KPIs for all?

To answer this question, we must again go back to the question of what you want out of the KPIs.For a board, it may not be relevant to decide which social media to be on or whether to invest in Google Ads or Facebook Ads. But it is relevant to know if the number of leads increases and what the cost is for each lead. For this simple reason, the board should not take part in all the KPIs that a marketing manager follows up and the CEO may want to see more KPIs than the board.

Examples of KPIs suitable for different roles

Summary

Make sure you spend some time at the beginning before setting up your KPIs and think about how they can help you make the right decisions. Also think about which KPIs should be reported to different parts of the company.Any KPIs that you can't immediately understand or that you need to explain in depth are probably not the right KPIs to use.KPIs should help streamline your way of working and make better decisions. Therefore, the less is more rule is often good in this context.Do you want help with developing the right KPIs for your digital marketing? Book a meeting with us and we will help you along the way.Book a meeting with Contitude

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