I’m a huge fan of data. Big data. Small data. It’s all interesting to me. Data gives us a place to judge success or a point from which to initiate improvement.
But you don’t need to have a major pool of metrics in order to judge where you stand online. When managing the day to day marketing operations, a hand full of KPIs (key performance indicators) is all that are necessary to keep your projects on task.
Really quick note. I am not advocating that businesses ignore a monthly audit of their marketing campaigns. That is completely necessary! The KPIs mentioned below are merely a place from which to maintain your day to day operations without loosing site of your progress.
Conversion Rate
This is a key metric to keep an eye on throughout the month. Basically, your conversion rate tells you if your website is actually selling your business or giving your visitors a reason to look at your competitors. If you have landing pages that never convert or have a very low percentage of conversion, you are going to want to deal with that sooner than later. Putting off conversion rate monitoring until the end of the month is an unwise move. Do it weekly on existing pages and monitor new pages at least three times per week for the first month or so.
Advertising Click-Through Rate
When you are spending money on a daily basis, it’s important to know that you are being productive. When you have low converting ads, you are missing a significant number of opportunities. Ensuring that your ads are converting and you are capitalizing on every opportunity possible is not a monthly task but should be done with frequency. Review reports and queue up low performing properties for audit and modification as soon as possible.
Social Engagement
I’m not a huge fan of the engagement measuring tools available today, but I do think businesses need to have some way of roughly judging their progress. Basically, you need to make sure you are keeping up a solid level of engagement within your marketplace. Tools like Klout can give you a baseline for your current level of engagement and a way to track growth. But ultimately, you need to define your company’s engagement metric and not allow a tool that can be gamed to define your engagement success. You determine whether your engagement is in conversations or in providing solid information to your marketplace. That’s for you to decide and not an algorithm.
