Ruhani Rabin
4 min readMar 13, 2019

Once you have firmly laid out the business objectives of your company, it is time to deliberate on the KPIs. KPIs are the best way for brands to track the success of any of their efforts, more especially in marketing. There is a lot of competition among marketers on the digital space, with a dynamic audience to work with. However, once you have nailed the KPI measures that work for your brand, it should not be that difficult to outshine your competition and scale up the ladder in your marketing efforts.

The challenging bit about KPIs is having a set of them that you stick by, regardless of how many other measures there are. Before you quickly get overwhelmed with numerous marketing KPI measures, here are several you cannot afford to overlook:

SERP

Your rank position on search engines says a lot about your brand as a whole. If you have been super intentional with content marketing and SEO, then, by all means, your SERP should indicate it. The more times your brand shows up in search results for particular keywords, the more success you have on your marketing endeavors. Even though SERP is not the ultimate indicator of success in marketing, it sure does concern you that your target audience can find you on Google. Therefore, ensure you make necessary adjustments based on how quickly or slowly you site is rising on the rank results.

Website traffic

In marketing, a website is the face of a company online. It is the platform where visitors, prospects and regular customers all converge for fresh content, products, and services. It is therefore expected that business owners be intentional about putting forth a lot of their marketing efforts on optimizing their websites for the public. In that case, this becomes the number one measure of your marketing success. When the traffic on your platform is not constant, there is a problem. When the numbers are steadily dropping over a long period, then there is an even greater problem.

Overall, your website traffic should reflect the efforts you put forth in marketing your products and services, alongside your brand’s identity. The more visible your marketing messages and campaigns are, the more traffic you should anticipate on your website, which qualifies website traffic as a crucial KPI measure.

Sales conversions

The whole point of indulging in marketing as a business is to heighten your sales. After investing so much on a Google keyword ranking tracker at SERPbook, you would expect higher sales conversions for all your rightfully targeted keywords. Depending on the number of strategies you employ for your marketing, there should be a correlation between sales and the activities happening on the different platforms you are on as a business. This means that you must be able to draw back how many sales there are form all our social media accounts, as well as from your website.

Social media shares

Social media may be fun and relationship-friendly, but that’s not all there is to it. The number of social media shares speaks volumes about your performance as a brand concerning marketing strategies. The more people share your content among their circles, the more success you have achieved in marketing your products and services. It also indicates that your marketing messages are very engaging, and this means a lot for your sale conversions along with your website traffic.

New visitors

The stats on how many new visitors you have on your site is vital as an indicator of marketing success. The new visitors mean that your marketing campaigns are gaining wider coverage than usual and that your keyword targeting is getting to the right people who are rather interested in the material you are sharing.

Returning visitors

Whether for the second or the tenth time, it matters whether or not people are willing to come back for more from your brand. If your regular customers are no longer consistent with consuming your marketing messages, then it means you have either stopped targeting them as your target group or that your content is not good enough for them to come back for more. It is usually the second option.

Bounce rates

Much as your bounce rates are not a positive performance indicator, they cannot be ignored. Choosing to overlook the exit rates of your platform is choosing to ignore the value you provide your audience. A lot of the times people exit a site when the information thereof is not relevant to their search, it has poor user experience, has low-quality material, takes ages to load, among other fatal reasons. With that, it counts that you are aware of how many people are displeased with your site, how quick they leave it and why they do. Use a tool like Google Analytics to set you off with actionable insights on this issue.

Social followers

Your social shares maybe great, but so should your following. In local optimization, marketing shifts focus to caring a lot about getting the attention of the local audience. Regarding your social media followers, the following may not directly equate to a higher ranking on SERP, but it does communicate that your brand is becoming a lot more visible online by the day. Ideally, the more followers you have, the wider the reach of your messages, and consequently, the higher the social shares.

Brand mentions and backlinks

If you are increasingly getting pingbacks of your site receiving links from different sources, then this is a great marketing performance indicator. For one, it shows that your efforts in content marketing are paying off, so much that other sites want to associates with your work. As for brand mentions, you should be alert for how many times your brand gets mentioned on different platforms.

Originally posted at RuhaniRabin.com
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Ruhani Rabin

Ruhani Rabin being a tech and product evangelist for two decades. He was VP, GM, CPO for various digital companies. Obsessed with Generative AI now.