digital marketing
By Carrie-ann | Nov 16, 2016 | Planning Your Marketing

Key Performance Indicators Guide

Once you’ve identified the Key Performance Indicators of your digital media campaign, you’ll want to set individual targets for each one and find a way to assess them. When targets are numerical, such as website traffic, length of time a visitor spends on your website or number of repeated visits, there are various tools you can use.
Running KPI reports
To begin tracking your KPIs, you should first complete a report for the current situation before any action is taken. Then, you can run another report after your media campaign. By comparing these two reports, you’ll be able to see if the campaign was successful and the results will also be measurable. The usual timeframe between the two reports is around 3 months, but some information can be best evaluated in real time too.
How to measure success
Reporting tools are an essential element of monitoring and measuring website metrics. To attempt to do this manually would not be a good ROI in terms of time or money. The good news is, many of these tools are free.
Recommended tools
Google Analytics is the market leader in free online website monitoring tools. This application allows users to track basic traffic and visitor information and also offers some extra paid professional add-ons.
Hubspot is an analytics platform that also measures inbound traffic, but it doesn’t offer as many options as Google Analytics. However, it is easy to use and ideal for small companies or marketing departments, which don’t have the time to learn new platforms.
Adobe Marketing Cloud is an integrated platform that offers real-time analysis of your website’s performance. It also offers a predictive function, to help you time your activities better to reach the widest audience.
GoSquared also offers real-time performance monitoring, with eCommerce reporting included. This channel can track revenues and report back against cost, to provide solid ROI information.
For a more serious monitoring action, Moz offers a comprehensive analytics platform, ideal for larger marketing activities. This platform generates reports on search outcomes, social media activities and even social listening, to see who is talking about your brand or product.
Get the buzz
More and more companies are becoming interested in how their brand is doing, not just on their own web page but on the web pages of others too. Finding out what customers are saying about you is vitally important as, for potential customers, what others are saying about a brand is often seen as a more reliable source of information than the company website. Hashtags are one way of getting in on the conversation, but many social media users don’t use hashtags, especially in online groups. However, several platforms offer specific social listening services.
Simply Measured scours various social networks to assess the power of your campaigns. It can also be integrated with Google Analytics.
Falcon Social is a premium, managed service that gives you access to various social listening and social media management applications across various social networks.
However, the mover and shaker in social listening is probably Hootsuite, which allows for real-time social media performance analysis. This can be especially important when your brand is newsworthy and you want to assess wins and losses in real time.