New digital media make it easier than ever to get numbers for everything, to measure the tiniest details about the effects of your marketing initiatives. It is even possible to optimize in real time, or to launch several campaigns at the same time and retain only the most effective.

However, this abundance of data can also be a trap! What do you do with all these indicators, and how do you choose the best ones to measure campaign performance?

Here’s everything you need to know about marketing performance indicators.

Start with performance indicators

Performance indicators must be determined well before the launch of a campaign, which is to say at the same time as you set your goals. It’s simple: each campaign goal should be associated to one or more marketing KPIs.

For example, if your goal is to raise your profile, your performance indicators could be spontaneous or assisted awareness, the number of visits to your website, the number of mentions in the media, the reach, the number of views, etc.

If you have an online store and you are looking to increase your sales, you should measure the conversion rate to obtain more transactions per visitor, the number of visitors to increase the number of transactions reciprocally, or even the cost per conversion, the decrease of which could help you increase the number of transactions on your site, by increasing the scope of your budget.

Company or campaign indicator?

It is also important to distinguish between the two types of performance indicators, company-level and campaign-level.

Company-level performance indicators must be continuously measured, whether you are in a campaign period or not. They are used to keep an eye on your company’s health and provide benchmarks when the time comes to measure the impact of a marketing initiative.

Here are a few examples of marketing performance indicators for your company that can be constantly measured:

• Awareness: the percentage of your target audience who is familiar with your brand
• Consideration: the degree to which consumers consider your brand when making purchases
• Market share: the percentage your product has of the total sales in its category
• Share of voice: the percentage of media investments made by your brand within its category
• Traffic: the number of visitors on your site, or in your establishment
• Sales: the number of transactions made within a certain period

Company-level indicators will also vary according to your industry, because it is important to tailor them to your reality. In the food industry, a manufacturer will monitor its velocity, which measures the turnover of its products on retailers’ shelves, or the total volume of sales in its category (also called All-Commodity Volume or ACV), which indicates its penetration of the distribution network for example. If you are in the hospitality industry, you would pay more attention to your occupation rate and your revenue per available room (RevPAR).

Then there are campaign-level indicators. They measure the effects of specific marketing efforts. Most of the time, they are not specifically related to your industry. They are marketing related and depend on your goals and the media used.

Here are some examples of marketing campaign-level performance indicators:

• Gross rating point (GRP): the percentage of the target market who saw the message X times
• Cost per thousand (CPM): cost per thousand impressions of a message, an impression equals an exposure to a message
• Engagement rate: the number of actions performed on a message out of the total number of impressions of the message
• Open rate: the number of opened emails over the number of emails sent
• Click rate: the number of clicks over the number of impressions
• Number of visits: the number of sessions on a site, regardless of the number of visitors
• Number of impressions: the number exposures to the message

The importance of getting it right

As we have seen above, it is essential to tailor your performance indicators to each campaign. When you launch a new campaign with new goals, you have to rethink what you usually do.

Let’s say that you almost always use digital transaction campaigns, but that this time, you want to develop an awareness campaign. In this case, your conversion rate or your cost per acquisition will no longer be as important and will not determine if your awareness campaign was successful.

After all, the goal is not the same and, what’s more, you are not necessarily addressing the same audience. The results are therefore not comparable. Instead, you should pay attention to either your reach, or the number of people exposed to the message, or to the number of new visitors to your website, which will indicate the exposure of the message to potential new customers.

You must always keep in mind the performance indicators selected in the beginning of the campaign so as not to get confused with those not related to your goals.

Take the case of a company looking to improve its social media engagement rate. At the end of the month, while looking at its stats, it could be satisfied to have acquired 500 new followers and increased its reach by 15%. However, if its engagement rate didn’t improve, it has failed to achieve its goals. The company should then ask questions and develop new initiatives to increase its engagement rate the following month.

So, even if an indicator is successful, it doesn’t mean anything for your campaign if it is not related to your goals.

In short, knowing how to effectively measure the effects of your marketing campaigns is essential to improve your performance and learn to get to know your audiences better. We hope that this post has enlightened you about the best practices to use when the time comes to choose your marketing KPIs.

We are fortunate today to have a wealth of data at our disposal; let’s make the most of it!