KPIs that Should Be Top of Mind This Year

Why Goal Setting is So Essential

Without goals, KPIs mean a whole lot less. To make sure there is meaning behind your performance metrics, you need to consider what you want for your business or organization. And, in order to do that, you need to set goals. If you’re unsure how to get started, forming SMART statements can help. S-M-A-R-T stands for:

• Specific (who, what, where, why, how)
• Measurable (quantifiable)
• Achievable (realistic)
• Relevant (aligns with your overall objectives)
• Time-Bound (timeframe/deadline)

However, we recommend adding one more “A” into the mix to make goals even more helpful. This “A” is for Actionable. Doing so eliminates any guesswork about how you’ll make good on this goal. An example of a well-crafted SMART+A goal would be something like:

Our marketing team aims to increase organic website traffic by 25 percent year-over-year, from January 1, 2024, to December 31, 2024. We’ll accomplish this goal by increasing our content marketing efforts by two posts a month, social media marketing by two posts a week, and SEO by finding one guest posting opportunity a month. Accomplishing this goal will result in increased sales, improved search engine ranking, and amplified brand awareness.

While it’s often essential to have a revenue goal, it’s helpful to be more granular in your goal setting. Consider what you need to make more money:

Do you need more website traffic?
Do you need better rankings in search results?
Do you need to increase your pay-per-click conversion rates?

With this level of specificity, you’ll realize there is a whole host of KPIs you may not have considered tracking but are essential to your overall goal. Here are a few that need to be top of mind:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) KPIs

1. Organic Traffic: The number of website visitors who come from organic (unpaid) search engine results pages. This type of traffic is earned by creating high-quality content, not paid for via pay-per-click ads. Optimizing a site for more organic traffic is arguably the most sustainable marketing strategy, as it continues to work even if you don’t have an ad budget.
2. Keyword Rankings: A webpage’s organic ranking position in search results for a specific keyword. Your overall website and subsequent webpages will have many different rankings across different keywords. Keyword ranking is arguably the most important SEO metric, as 75.1 percent of all clicks go to the top three organic results.
3. Bounce Rate: A bounce is a single-page session on your site, or put another way, when a user opens a single page on your site and then exits without clicking over to another page. Therefore, bounce rate is single-page sessions divided by all sessions.
4. Number of Backlinks: A link that goes from one website to another. Also called "inbound links" or "incoming links," backlinks are a vital ranking signal for search engines. Accordingly, the more backlinks you get (that aren’t from spammy sites!), the higher your search ranking will climb.

Social Media, Content, & Video KPIs

1. Engagement Rate: Typically used in the context of social media content, engagement rate is the average number of interactions your post receives per follower. You can calculate it by dividing the total number of interactions your content receives by your total number of followers, multiplied by 100 percent. What counts as an interaction depends on the platform, but typically, likes, reactions, shares, and comments all count.
2. View Count: Again, in the context of social media (including YouTube), view count is how many people saw your video. However, every platform measures views differently. YouTube looks for about 30 seconds of view time, whereas Facebook and Instagram count a view at around three seconds.
3. Watch Time: Depending on the platform, watch time will be defined as the total time viewers spent watching your videos (more common) or the average amount of time people watched your videos (less common). Total watch time and average watch time are both essential metrics in video SEO.
4. Follower Growth Rate: The change in your number of followers or acquisition of new followers in a given time period, expressed as a percentage. Follower growth rate is calculated as the number of followers you gained divided by the number of followers you started with (during a specific timeframe), times 100 percent, or Follower Growth Rate = New Followers ÷ Starting Follower Count × 100%.
5. Brand Mentions: Any instances where people mention your business or its products and services on digital platforms such as social media apps, blogs, review websites, or forums. Monitoring these online mentions is often called social listening. We typically categorize brand mentions in three ways:
6. Direct: They mention your brand name
7. Indirect: They mention your product or service
8. Competitive: They mention a competitor's product, service, or brand but not yours.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

1. Click-Through Rate (CTR): The ratio (clicks ÷ impressions = CTR) of people who see your ad in search results and click it. For example, if you had 50 clicks and 1000 impressions, your CTR would be 5%. A high CTR indicates that users find your listing in search results helpful and relevant.
2. Cost-per-click (CPC): The cost for each click on your ads. CPC pricing is sometimes known as pay-per-click (PPC). With vigilant management, you can reduce your CPC to fit your budget and goals. Platforms like Google Ads consider the quality and relevance of your ads during ad auctions. With a high Quality Score and relevant text and images, you can reduce your CPC.
3. Conversion Rate: Before defining conversion rate, let’s discuss what a conversion is. A conversion is a value action you’d like to count, as it’s essential to your business, such as a purchase or form submission. Accordingly, conversion rate is the average number of conversions per ad interaction. For example, if you had 60 conversions from 1,000 interactions, your conversion rate would be six percent since 60 ÷ 1,000 = 6%.
4. Quality Score: Quality Score is a Google Ads diagnostic tool that tells you how well your ad quality compares to other advertisers. Google uses a scale from 1-10, with higher quality scores indicating that your ads and landing pages are more relevant and valuable to someone searching for your keywords than other advertisers.
5. Return on Ad Spend (ROAS): The amount of revenue your business earns per dollar it spends on advertising. Essentially, it’s a more specific way to measure return on investment (ROI). As a benchmark, the average ROAS is 200 percent, meaning two dollars are made for every dollar spent on ads.

Email Marketing

1. Open Rate: A percentage that tells you how many successfully delivered campaigns were opened by subscribers. You can calculate open rate by dividing the number of people who opened an email by the number of people who received the email ((Emails opened ÷ Emails sent) × 100)). The average email open rate for all industries we analyzed is 21.33%.
2. List Growth Rate: A percent that measures the rate at which your email or subscriber list grows over a specific period. List growth rate is calculated as the number of subscribers you gained divided by the number of subscribers you started with (during a particular time frame), times 100 percent, or List Growth Rate = New Followers ÷ Starting Follower Count × 100%.

Let Us Lighten Your Werkload

Keeping track of all of these KPIs and forming actionable plans around this data can be overwhelming. But remember, your strength as a business is reflected in your exceptional products and services rather than your expertise at tracking digital marketing KPIs. To position yourself for healthy, organic growth in 2024, reach out to Werkbot. We’ll build a KPI dashboard around your specific needs and goals so you can dig deep into the data or scan our at-a-glance reports. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help you.