Digitalization opens up enormous potential: While analog marketing measures were difficult to measure in terms of efficiency, very concrete KPIs can be analyzed in online marketing - and without large investments or long-term commitment.
Data, Data, Data
Marketing must address the needs of customers - and do so precisely. But what makes customers tick today? How precisely do you hit their nerve with your campaigns? Does the approach lead to success at all?
This is where digitalization marks a milestone that raises the quality of marketing campaigns to a new level: Data is generated at every step a potential customer takes on their customer journey - and this can be intelligently evaluated with the help of digital tools. Of course, without violating the regulations of the GDPR.
Today, no company can operate successfully without an online presence - customer behaviour has already changed too dramatically, even in the B2B sector.
Business customers first research the Internet for a suitable solution to a problem or a challenge, compare the offers and inform themselves about the relevant providers.
At this point, you should already show a high-quality presence - in the form of your own homepage, profiles in the social media channels and, of course, in the results lists of the relevant search engines.
If your business is not ranked optimally, the likelihood of being found online by your target audience is reduced.
This makes it all the more important to constantly optimise online presences and measures. This is where the various analysis tools come into play, which allow a look at the important key figures and thus make adjustment potential visible.
Key Performance Indicator (KPI)
The term has long been part of the vocabulary of marketing and sales, as it refers to key performance indicators that describe the performance of entrepreneurial activities. Up to now, such analyses have been provided by management or controlling in order to check the profitability of companies or the return on investments. However, KPIs are also used when setting goals in the operative business or defining individual measures.
Applied to activities on the Internet, there are a variety of ways to express the successes or failures of online campaigns in clear figures that go far beyond the usual key figures from traditional marketing or business administration.
Instead, it is important to select the really relevant online KPIs and use them in a targeted manner: Different KPIs are interesting for every business sector - and this is also true for online marketing. And yet there are common intersections, as these KPI examples are intended to show.
A Category Question: Classification of Online KPIs
First of all, it should be emphasized that generating and evaluating online KPIs definitely requires a certain amount of know-how. Here, well-founded experience plays an essential role in order to be able to classify the analyses of visibility or domain popularity in a target-oriented way.
Especially in areas such as marketing automation, nothing works without the right KPIs. An intelligent classification into different categories makes sense. On the one hand, this allows you to generate overarching key figures, but also KPIs for each individual area.
Areas in which KPIs can be used:
The interesting thing about this is that it gives you the opportunity to examine each individual advertising measure in detail: Did the effort pay off? Is the campaign accepted? Where do you need to make improvements?
Classic KPI Examples in Relation to Turnover
Here you will find a whole range of common key performance indicators: These classic KPIs refer to fundamental variables in business management. In online marketing, these include, for example:
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Number of Conversions: If you target specific actions on the customer side with a campaign, such as contacting a sales representative or obtaining a service, the absolute number of these previously clearly defined activities is measured here.
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Conversion Rate: Of course, what is interesting in this context is how many visitors you had to attract to your website in order to achieve the measured number of conversions: This metric describes this ratio.
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Cost per action (CPA): This is about the costs: CPA shows the ratio of advertising costs to the realized conversions. However, this is not yet a clear statement about the profitability of your advertising measures.
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Return of Invest (ROI): As in any other business sector, ROI is one of the most important key figures: Profit and capital divided. As long as you get a result greater than 1, the investment is worthwhile.
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Return of Ad Spend (ROAS): Divide the profit by the costs you spend on search engine advertising, for example Google Ad campaigns. If the result is above 1, you've run a successful campaign.
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Cost-to-sales ratio (KUR): Now it gets exciting: This quotient of advertising costs and sales shows the profitability. However, the goal here is to achieve the smallest possible result - then your advertising is profitable.
Source: Customer Journey Reporting from Pedalix Software
Specific KPI Examples around Your Website
Website KPIs are not only interesting for pure e-commerce companies or online magazines - rather, companies in every industry should make sure that their digital business card fulfills its function in every respect.
Here are some KPI examples to measure the quality of web presences and to draw important conclusions for possible optimizations:
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Unique Visitors: number of individual website visitors, it provides information about the reach.
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Visits: This describes how often an individual user visits the respective website within a specified period of time.
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Bounce rate: This key figure shows how many visitors leave your website without clicking on anything or becoming active.
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Dwell time: Also meaningful: the length of time a user stays on the website - from the first to the last action.
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User ratio: It is easy to analyse the ratio of returning and new visitors to a website. It is clear that the more new visitors are recorded, the greater the website reach.
Even these selected KPI examples show that important conclusions can be drawn from the recorded and calculated data: If visitors to your website don't stay there for long, there is probably an urgent need for action.
Obviously there is a lack of relevance or the homepage as a whole is not structured in a way that appeals to your potential customers.
Step by step you get to know your customers and especially their demands better with these KPIs - and that without any technical effort or costly market research.
Conclusion
The variety of online KPIs is enormous - this may be confusing at first. To make matters worse, special tools are needed for search engine optimization or content marketing in order to determine the relevant KPIs. However, these KPIs quickly become common quantities and their handling becomes a matter of course.
The advantages that these new forms of information gathering bring with them are quite simply convincing in practical work: You can track exactly how your target customers react to specific addresses - this is indispensable, especially in marketing automation.
But above all, the effort pays off: Once the analysis tools are introduced, you can make well-founded statements at any time - at the click of a mouse.
