What Marketing KPIs Should I Be Tracking?

For years, marketers have been trying to set trackable metrics around their activities to validate their value and business contribution. There are thousands of articles on the Web that say you should track X, Y, Z, and just as many articles that say you should be tracking A, B, C. So what marketing KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) should you actually be tracking?

When trying to answer this question, I believe you have to first take a look at what types of marketing professionals are on your team. Do you have a social guru? A communications/PR pro? An SEO? The answer to “Which KPIs should I be tracking for my team?” should always start with figuring out where your people are spending their time and energy.

This is essential because each of these job functions (Comms, SEO and Social Media) have very specific KPIs that are different from one another. If you try to evaluate your social media specialist the same way you are evaluating your SEO specialist, you are setting your team up for failure. Plain and simple.

For the rest of this post, I will run through what I believe to be the most important KPIs for these three marketing areas — Communications, SEO and Social Media. While there are dozens of other marketing job functions out there, these have become the main pillars of most digital marketing shops.

Marketing KPIs for Communication Professionals

Public Relations

I come from a PR agency background, so I know how hard it is for a communications professional to prove their value to a client or executive. It’s never been easy to prove how that awesome placement you landed on New York Times, Forbes or Entrepreneur actually drove business value past brand awareness. Below are some KPIs you should be tracking ASAP! (If you can present these stats during your next performance meeting, you will knock the socks off your client/executive.)

Share of Voice:

The percentage of your brand’s coverage relative to your competitors.

Advertising Value Equivalency:

The cost ($USD) to generate the same number of impressions/views through paid advertising. Many tools like Cision and Meltwater can help you calculate this.

Potential Reach:

The total viewership of the Websites (blogs, news publications, associations, etc) where your earned media coverage appeared.

Marketing KPIs for Social Media Professionals

Social Media Landscape

If 5 years ago, you would have told the CEO of a small business that you wanted to hire someone just to run your social media operation, they would’ve looked at you as if were crazy. They probably would’ve asked you, “Excuse me, you want to pay someone to just post on Facebook?”

Those days are long gone (for the most part). Most clients and executives now understand just how important social media is, and how great it can be from a lead nurturing and brand awareness perspective. But how does one prove the value of Twitter, FaceBook and SnapChat?

Here are some KPIs that should make it easy to prove your value:

Owned Audience Size:

The number of followers on each of your individual channels (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, SnapChat, etc.)

Total Engagement:

The number of shares, likes, retweets, replies, direct messages and reposts.

Sentiment:

The percentage of engagements with positive, negative or negative tones.

Reach:

This can be calculated in different ways, but I like to use the number of impressions generated across all of your social media accounts. Basically, how many eyeballs actually saw your social content.

Marketing KPIs for Organic Search Specialists

SEO Strategy

SEO continues to be one of the premier ways to generate Web traffic, online conversions/sales and build a customer base. Even though this marketing function has received a lot of attention over the last few years, many digital marketing shops are not measuring the effectiveness of their SEO team properly.

Here are a few KPIs that are must-haves for your search team:

Web traffic from Organic Search:

There is no better way to measure your SEO team than by raw traffic numbers. If they are doing their job, sessions/users should always be up and to the right.

Keyword Rankings:

Measure the performance of your most important search queries is critical to understanding the SEO performance of your team. If you aren’t ranking, you aren’t getting traffic. Plain and simple.

Click Through Rate:

While ranking in on the top page of the SERP is fantastic, if your Title Tags and Meta Descriptions are properly optimized, people might skip your SERP listing and click on one of your competitors. Make sure to use Google Search Console to evaluate Click Through Rate (CTR) both at the query and page level.

Organic Search Conversions:

While generating traffic is a wonderful thing, you should also measure your SEO team on how many conversions they are actually producing. This is critical because they could be sending organic search traffic from irrelevant keywords, thus sending garbage traffic to your Website. This is a very important quality measurement of your SEO traffic.

If you are a communications/PR, social media or SEO professional and you are not currently tracking the metrics I listed above, please do yourself a favor and start ASAP. Your client, executive and your future self will thank you!

Do you think I’m missing some important digital marketing KPIs? If you do, please share them in the comments below!