As in other areas of a company, metrics and KPIs are also extremely important data for developing digital marketing strategies.
As everything is measurable online, Key Performance Indicators ( KPIs) are an essential starting point for defining more effective actions. Just like metrics.
What then differentiates one criterion from another? And how can each of them help with my business goals?
In this article, we’ve gathered everything you need to know about metrics and KPIs, as well as some practical examples (within marketing) for your project. Shall we check it out?
Metrics and KPIs: what’s the difference?
Before we talk about defining KPIs and metrics to monitor in your digital marketing strategy, we need to differentiate these two terms.
Confusion is normal, but it’s important to know that they are not the same thing. Metrics are your project’s raw performance data, which shows everything that happened across your different channels in a given period.
When some of these metrics become important for the development of your business and achieving the objectives set, they can become Key Performance Indicators.
In other words, KPIs are more related to specific company results and are essential for the decision-making process.
They help to redefine new paths and goals that lead to achieving the main objective. Below, we give some examples of indicators aimed at digital marketing.
How to choose the right KPIs for my business?
If you have an online business, such as e-commerce, or use an Inbound Marketing strategy to attract new customers, defining the right indicators makes all the difference to your success.
First of all, KPIs must be linked to your objectives, and this, of course, will depend on what stage of maturity your company is in (are you just starting and need to attract potential consumers or are you already established in the market and need to retain them? ).
For those who have just started an Inbound strategy, for example, it is important to pay attention to metrics related to attraction, such as:
- Number of Subscribers in the E-mail Database;
- Visitor to Lead Conversion Rate;
- Cost per Lead (CPL).
As the strategy develops and the objective moves towards the bottom of the funnel, with increased sales, it is possible to focus on KPIs such as:
- Number of Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs);
- Cost per Lead at each stage of the funnel;
- Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC);
- Customer Growth Rate.
Meanwhile, in e-commerce, you can be guided by important indicators for the sale of your products, such as:
- Sales Quantity;
- Conversion rate;
- Average ticket.
In all the examples, we can see the importance of having this focus on your objective. It is what helps to define more effective marketing strategies that generate results.
So let’s look at a quick, practical example: if you have an online store, follow the Average Ticket, and want to increase it, it is possible to structure promotions with discounts or free shipping above a certain amount, encouraging customers to pay more for a benefit bigger.
And what metrics should I monitor in my digital marketing strategy?
It is worth emphasizing here that the importance of KPIs for the development of a business does not exclude the role of general metrics in a digital marketing project.
Monitoring this data closely is essential to rethink your actions and obtain insights for more effective campaigns.
Thinking again about the e-commerce example, even if the objective is to increase the Average Ticket and your strategies are aimed at this, it is necessary to measure everything that generates the expected result.
In other words, if you take your promotion campaign to social networks, ads, and emails, you must closely analyze the performance of each defined action and the potential for using these channels to achieve your goals.
But be careful not to get caught up in vanity metrics alone! Likes, shares, and comments are good engagement data, but, alone, they do not show all the results of your actions to the public.
Here are the softwares for these specific analyses for the development of both projects and businesses.
Therefore, our main objective is always to help marketers collect this data more simply so that they are more available to focus on the project’s overall performance and the most important indicators.
In seconds, you have all the main social media metrics in your hands and can analyze and customize the report with the most relevant information for your team and decision-makers.
