How to set effective KPIs for your social media and website

Here some tips and advice for setting KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) for your digital marketing efforts and promotions on your website and social media.

In the day and age where online content has taken over our daily lives, there is such a focus on delivering results in organisations and really prove ROI (return on investment) to stakeholders: social media content, website blog pieces, Google Ads campaigns, and more.

This definitely takes a toll on small media, comms and marketing teams, with limited capacity and budget.

How can you set KPIs for your marketing efforts effectively, to monitor consistently your campaigns to stakeholders but without overloading your team's work capacity?

We are going to dive in 3 sections to explain why you should use and set KPIs appropriately; then we are going to go deeper in the various KPIs and finally how to set your KPIs in an effective and efficient manner.

Why should you use KPIs?

KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) are no other than specific metrics that highlight a specific performance, they can either highlight a poor, mediocre or excellent result.

KPIs have been used in all sorts of fields, these are metrics that are used to monitor results and analyse performance of specific organisational efforts. They are used in finance, information technologies, marketing, media and entertainment industries and more

But why should you set and use KPIs in your marketing efforts? Especially in digital marketing.

KPIs are the metrics you use to monitor if a campaign or piece of content has been effective. Without them, you would not be able to report on your campaign performance and ROI.

KPIs keep you straight with your paid advertising campaigns and organic content for all your digital platforms (social media, website, blogs, etc) as they revolve around analytics and numerical figures.

They are also useful to create a baseline bank of data against which compare all your future digital performance.

In the end, both small businesses and larger organisations have to report or demonstrate how effectively they are spending budgets and workplace capacity and if those efforts have paid off with any ROI. This is where KPIs come into play to help you do all the above.

What KPI should you use then? How do you know what they are?

There are many KPIs. They are based on the type of campaign/content you are publishing, the platform and the objective of your efforts.

We are going to focus on the most relevant KPIs to digital marketing for both organic and paid content on websites and more generally on social media. This is because there are many social media platforms with a huge spectrum of audiences and type of content.

However you should grasp the basic types of KPIs in digital marketing by the end of this article.

What are your objectives?

We need to first recognise what we are trying to achieve with these pieces of content or paid advertising. The goal of your objectives will have a huge impact your KPIs, as well as the type of content.

The objective will define what type of content you are making and the type of KPIs you should set against that objective

• Awareness/Traffic

• Interest/Engagement

• Consideration/Lead Generation

• Retention/Advocacy

These correspond closely to different stages of the consumer journey, and we can learn a lot from applying it to digital marketing efforts and objectives.

KPIs for WEB MARKETING (e.g. web pages/blogs, or paid ads)

As regards web content and advertising, once you have a clear objective and know where that sits with your audience/consumer journey, you can look at which KPIs are most effective to monitor and report performance.

Awareness: your goal for both organic and paid content is to share your organisation's brand identity, your products/services; basically to make people in your selected audience know what your unique points are through your content.

The aim is to create traffic to your web page/campaign page or impressions to a specific ad.

You will want to choose KPIs that demonstrate increased traffic, a set amount of impressions, increased landings on specific campaign pages.

• Unique Pageviews and Impressions (for ads only)

• Traffic Source: Organic Traffic or Paid Ad Traffic (depending if it is web content or web ads)

  
  

• Engagement Rate (only for campaign pages or landing pages linked to ads)

  
  

Interest: your goal for both organic and paid content is to diversify yourself from the competition and shine through to your audience with your unique selling points and start create interest and engage with potential consumers.

The aim to increase engagement with your website and content organically or through advertising.

You will want to choose KPIs that demonstrate increased engagement, average time on page, platform sharing link, comments, contacts, newsletter registrations.

• Engagement Rate

• Engaged Visits

• Average Time On Page

• Counter for comments, newsletter sign ups, contact forms queries (wherever possible depending on the type of content)

  
  

Consideration: your goal for both organic and paid content is to help the consumers to purchase your service or product, getting over the line of the checkout process or any other final CTA (call to action).

The aim is to increase lead generations and have consumers complete CTAs

• Conversion Rate

• Total of Conversions

• Total CTA Completions (e.g. form completion, event registrations, purchases and sign -ups)

Retention: your goal for both organic and paid content is to provide additional value to consumers that have completed one of your final CTAs whilst all creating a loyal consumer base that is going to come back to your organisation.

The aim to nurture advocacy and grow returning visitors/loyal consumer base

• Returning Visitors vs New Visitors

  
  

• Conversions for specific sign ups, groups, events (content should be relevant to creating advocacy or aimed at returning consumers)]

• Compare Returning Visitors Engagement Rate and Time on Page versus New Visitors' data