Are you wondering what key performance indicators (KPIs) you should include in your marketing reports?
KPIs in marketing are crucial for your company’s growth. By tracking the right metrics that are leading you toward concrete goals, you can more quickly build a strategy that moves your business forward.
But how do you know what KPIs to include in your marketing reports? Well, that’s exactly what we’re going to cover today.
Because we have the top 21 KPIs that you should add to your marketing reports. First, though, let’s get crystal clear on what KPIs are and why they matter.
Are You Tracking KPIs or Metrics?
In the past, we’ve written about the differences between KPIs and metrics. While both are valuable, understanding what makes each term unique will help as you optimize your marketing strategy.
So, as a quick refresher, here’s the big difference between the two:
- Metrics: A neutral piece of data that tells you how something is
- KPIs: A metrics put into the context of a concrete goal, letting you know whether that data is “good” or “bad”
The main value in a KPI is that it has a clear mark to either hit or miss. If you have 100,000 unique pageviews, that’s a metric.
Sure, 100,000 is a lot, but the phrase “a lot” is relative. If your goal (or KPI) is 250,000 unique pageviews, then you know something needs to be improved.
If your KPI is 50,000 unique pageviews, then you know something worked really well.
Either way, by having a clear goal for your metrics–thus turning them into KPIs–you can more easily build a marketing strategy that actually works.
So, with that in mind, let’s look at the top 21 KPIs you can start including in your marketing reports.
21 KPIs for Marketing Teams to Track
Since this is such a comprehensive overview, we’ve broken the KPIs into categories by marketing channel:
- Email Marketing
- Social Media Marketing (both paid and organic)
- Marketing with Google tools (both paid, organic, and site performance)
As you can see, these KPIs are sourced from various platforms. That’s why, before we begin, I wanted to mention the importance of having the right marketing report builder in your corner.
Even if you use half the KPIs listed below, you’ll still need to pull some data from your email service provider (ESP), Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and any social media channels you use.
This can become tedious, cumbersome, and, frankly, expensive when you pay someone by the hour to compile data from all these sources.
That’s where Metrics Watch comes in:
Metrics Watch is the best marketing report builder around. It’s perfect for businesses and agencies alike because it gets rid of all friction from the report sharing process. Here’s a breakdown of how it works:
- Build your report with a drag and drop builder from your favorite marketing channels
- Determine who needs those specific KPIs
- Decide how often you want to send them a report
- Sit back and focus on other areas of your business while everything automatically arrives in your recipients’ inbox.
That last point is important. That’s because Metrics Watch is one of the few marketing report builders that doesn’t send data in 3rd-party PDFs or share it with online dashboards.
Both of these methods add friction to the report sharing process, and they’re just not necessary. It’s why one of my favorite clients, onvista, chose Metrics Watch over 20+ competing tools.
Like they said, they just needed to get the right data to the right people, in a format everyone already knows.
Want to see it in action for FREE? Click below to sign up for your 14-day free trial, no credit card required:
Track All Your KPIs Today!Then, you can add some of the following 21 KPIs to your marketing reports in minutes! Let’s dive in.
1) Email Marketing
Email is one of the best digital marketing tools when it comes to giving you a solid ROI. But you’ll still want to pay close attention to your metrics to make sure you’re getting the results you want. Here are the key ones to track for email marketing campaigns:
Open rates – how many of the people on your mailing list actually open your emails? Sadly, not the whole list. Your open rate is the percentage of subscribers who opened your email. It’s a good indicator of how engaged your list is and whether you are getting your subject lines right.
Click-through rate (CTR) – assuming you aren’t just writing to your mailing lists to say hello, you’ll want to know how many of the people who receive your emails take the next step. That usually means clicking a link in your emails’ content. This metric helps you to assess how effective your email copy is at driving traffic to your site.
List growth – you can do a lot with a small mailing list. But you’ll want to see that list growing over time. New subscribers show that people are aware of your brand and want to engage. Keeping those subscribers means you’re giving them content they value. Your list growth rate is the percentage change over the period you are interested in (usually a week or a month).
Unsubscribe rate – losing subscribers from time to time is an inevitable part of email marketing. But you’ll still want to keep track of your unsubscribe rates in case of any sudden leaps that might tell you there is a problem with your email marketing strategy or content.
2) Social Media Marketing
There are some differences in which metrics are available from each social media platform, but most will give you a fair amount of information to help you judge the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns.
I’ve split these into organic content and paid ads since there are a few extra metrics to consider for paid content.
a) Organic Posts and Pages
Reach – your reach tells you how many unique views your content has had during the period you’re interested in. For most platforms, you can also dive deeper to see the reach for each post. Reach isn’t available for some platforms though, so you’ll need to track impressions instead. If you aren’t sure of the difference between these two, check out my post explaining it here.
Engagement rate – eyes on your posts isn’t enough to tell you how engaged people are with your content. They could easily scroll on by without really registering it. So, you’ll want to track your engagement rate, too. This is the percentage of the people who saw your content and then interacted with it in some way. That might be likes, comments, saves, clicks, or views (for videos).
Audience growth rate – just like with your mailing list, you’re aiming to grow your social media audience over time. That doesn’t mean that you should panic about the absolute number of followers you have. A small, engaged audience is better than a large one that couldn’t care less. But your growth rate does matter if you’re serious about scaling your business. This is the percentage change in your following over a period of time.
Click-through rate – social media is great for growing brand awareness and loyalty. But even your organic content can send visitors to your website. So, you’ll want to measure your CTR both as an average over time and for individual posts, to help you determine which content drives the most visitors to your site.
b) Paid Ads
The metrics we went through above for organic content are useful for your paid ads on social media, too. But there are a few other marketing KPIs to monitor for paid campaigns:
Cost-per-click – cost-per-click (CPC) tells you how much each person who has clicked on your paid content has cost you. A low CPC is a good indicator that your audience is engaging well with your ad, as well as being good for your bottom line. A high CPC suggests you’re targeting the wrong audience or need to rework your ads. Again, “low” and “high” costs are relative to your company’s strategy, budget, and target audience.
Conversion rate – technically, conversion rate isn’t monitored on social media itself. But it is an important metric for any paid ads. It tells you what percentage of the people who saw your ads went on to complete the action you wanted them to take. This might be sales-related, or it might be new email subscribers or entrants to a competition. You can monitor conversion rates by creating custom goals or events in Google Analytics.
Revenue generation – this one is probably the hardest to monitor because it requires you to be able to track people through your sales funnel. You may be able to do this via Google Analytics or using your CRM database. Or you may need to enlist the help of your sales team.
But this tells you how much revenue each social media advertising campaign brings in and is an important one for measuring your ROI from paid ads.
3) Google
Google offers you plenty of useful tools to monitor and create digital marketing campaigns. I’ve broken these metrics down according to which tool you’d use to track them, including:
- Google Analytics
- Google Adwords
- Google Search Console
a) Organic Traffic (Google Analytics)
New and returning visitors – repeat customers are always welcome. But unless your retention rate is 100%, you need to attract new customers, too. Tracking both your new and returning website visitors gives you a good insight into how well your customer retention is going and how effective you are at attracting new leads.
Traffic source – you’ll also want to keep an eye on where those visitors are coming from, especially if you’re using a wide variety of different digital marketing platforms. Knowing where your website visitors are coming from helps you assess where to concentrate your marketing efforts. Direct traffic is also a great sign of brand loyalty.
Conversion rate by source – sadly, window shopping isn’t limited to brick-and-mortar stores. Plenty of people will drop by your website just to browse. We’ve already talked a bit about conversion rates, which are important for any marketing campaign. But Google Analytics lets you compare your conversion rate by source/medium, meaning you can see which channel is sending you the best leads.
Bounce rate – if your site isn’t what a visitor was after, they’ll quickly bounce back off. Monitoring bounce rate can help you to adjust your copy, target audience, and keywords to make sure you are attracting people who are genuinely interested in what you have to offer.
But remember to do this strategically. Check bounce rates for pages or channel. If you only track your site’s global bounce rate, you could have individual pieces of poorly performing content that throws off your averages.
Time on site is also a good one to track in conjunction with bounce rate. If visitors are spending a long time on your site without converting, you have some work to do in persuading them to take the next step in your sales funnel.
b) Paid ads (Google Adwords)
Cost – this one is probably a no-brainer. When you set up a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign with Google Ads, you’ll want to know how much it has cost you so far. Assuming you are tracking the revenue or leads you generate from your campaign, you can also use this to monitor your return on ad spend (ROAS) or cost-per-acquisition.
Reach and impressions – Tracking how many people have seen your ad gives you an idea of how effective different campaigns are at getting in front of people. You can also use this information to make sure you are targeting the right keywords.
Click-through rate – just like your email and social media marketing, CTR is important for monitoring the effectiveness of your Google Ads. A higher CTR shows your copy is effective and you are getting in front of the right audiences. A lower one suggests you have some tweaking to do or that you’re targeting the wrong keywords.
c) Site Performance (Google Search Console)
Highest performing keywords – with Google Search Console, you can track which search queries gave the most organic impressions of your site, which tells you which keywords are performing well for you. This helps you to monitor whether your SEO efforts are working or not.
Average position – as well as telling you which queries your site shows up for, you can see your average position on the search results pages (SERPS) for those queries. You can filter down by query if you have keywords you are especially targeting.
Average click-through rate – the Search Console will also show you the average CTR by search query, which is a helpful way to monitor the keywords that are driving visitors to your site. A higher average CTR indicates that your site is matching user intent well for that keyword, so you are more likely to attract a warm audience.
And that’s it! These have been the top 21 KPIs to include in your marketing reports.
Track All Your KPIs Today!We hope you found this post helpful. If you did, you might also want to check out the following articles:
These resources will have everything you need to create better, smarter marketing reports that give you a larger ROI.