Source: Fauxels

How to define KPIs 

When starting the process of defining KPIs, the professional should ask himself:

• What information do I wish to obtain? 
• What is the desired outcome and why is it important?
• Who is responsible for the result?
• How will I achieve the result?
• How often will the goal and progress be re-evaluated?
• How will I measure success?
• It is critical to align the indicators according to the business objectives.

A good KPI has certain basic characteristics: it is available to be measured; it is important and relevant to the basis of the business; it helps in making smart choices, and it has periodicity, i.e., it needs to be tracked and measured constantly.

In short, a good KPI shows how your goal is bringing more business or business opportunities to your company.

KPIs for brands

During the process of analyzing your brand, you should consider buying behavior and information, advertising and touchpoints, brand promises and associations, brand digitality, and their individual questions.

For a brand to succeed, it is crucial to know the needs and wants of consumers, and your target audience, have a broad view of the market and competition and understand how your brand can become more relevant and attractive over time.

Source: Brand Tracking @ Statista Q.

The main types of KPIs are sales, marketing, and productivity, and their main categories are:

• Productivity indicators

They measure the number of resources the company uses to generate a given product and/or service.

• Quality indicators

Help analyze the quality of the product and/or service throughout the production process.

• Capacity indicators 

Analyze the response capacity of a process through the relationship between outputs produced per unit of time.

• Strategic Indicators

They provide a comparison of the company’s current scenario concerning previously defined goals.

Source: Mikael Blomkvist

KPIs can also be classified into three basic categories:

1. Primary KPIs

These are the primary ones for your objective, namely: leads (potential customers), traffic, acquisition cost per lead, conversion rate, total revenue, and revenue per purchase, among others.

2. Secondary KPIs

They show that the testing and management of the strategy are going well. Secondary KPIs should justify the primary ones, showing how those results are being achieved. Some examples: cost per lead at each stage of the funnel, newsletter subscribers, blog subscribers, recurring blog visits, cost per visitor, traffic origin (organic, paid, social media, direct, email, and others), and average price per transaction.

3. Practical KPIs 

Page views and visits, bounce rate, best landing pages, page rank, most searched keywords (according to your business), most read/visited content, traffic, visitors (new vs. recurring), and social interactions.

The Marketing manager should periodically evaluate all the chosen KPIs, however, the most interesting KPIs for the management are the ones that bring financial gains to the company.

KPIs versus metrics

KPIs and metrics are not the same things. While KPIs are indicators of company performance, a metric is just something to be quantified or measured, which generates reports and insights. 

However, a metric can become a KPI when it helps with internal company decisions and/or guides the company in its purposes since to be a KPI, it has to be valuable to the business and help managers make smart decisions.

Always keep in mind that the KPI must be relevant to the purpose. Vanity indicators, that is, indicators that do not show any results, are not good KPIs, such as, for example, the number of followers and amount of likes on Instagram.

KPIs that measure the success of brands

There are thousands of KPIs, which can be numbers or percentages, and the challenge is to figure out which ones are most important for your business while also taking into account your company’s industry or sector.

Source: Vlada Karpovich

Quantity of Leads

Lead is a business opportunity, that is, a person interested in the product or service, or a potential customer. To attract visitors and convince them to leave the contact, you need a strategic and focused Inbound Marketing campaign. This indicator is relevant for both the Sales team and the Marketing team, just identify the total number of leads generated in the business in a given period.

Quantity of Prospects

Prospect is a lead in a more advanced stage, almost ready to purchase the product. When a lead evolves into a prospect, the Sales team will understand the best moment to approach it, how to do it, and which offers are more interesting for this future consumer.

Cost per Lead (CPL)

The CPL is the cost to generate a lead. It is necessary to measure each channel and acquisition method to understand which one generates more leads and its respective cost, and thus optimize investments and increase lead generation. Formula to calculate the CPL: total cost of marketing actions ÷ number of leads generated in a given period.

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

The CAC is related to both Marketing and Finance. It is the company’s average expenditure for the acquisition of a customer. It can be calculated using the formula: total sales and marketing expenses ÷ total customers acquired.

Cost per Click (CPC)

The CPC is the cost determined by online advertising platforms for each click on a sponsored ad. It is the actual amount the advertiser will pay for the click on your ad. Calculation: total campaign cost ÷ number of clicks the ad received.

Churns Rate

The churn rate is the total amount of cancellations, i.e. how much revenue or customers the company lost. Calculation: the number of customers lost ÷ total active customers at the start of the analysis period × 100.

Lead Conversion Rate

It is the percentage of leads that became customers, in other words, generated leads versus converted leads, very useful for analyzing the performance of the Digital Marketing strategy, calculated using the formula: total leads ÷ total visitors × 100.

Click Through Rate (CTR)

The CTR is one of the most important indicators to be monitored in a Digital Marketing strategy. It is the click-through rate of an email or ad, which indicates the percentage of people who clicked on the link after viewing it. It is calculated using the following formula: number of clicks the ad received ÷ total times the ad was displayed × 100.

Customer Retention Rate 

The customer retention rate is the number of customers who remain loyal to the company after conversion or purchase. The longer you keep a customer, the greater their lifetime value. 

Monthly Qualified Leads

Some factors can show when the leads are ready, that is, qualified for the Sales team to act: the need the lead demonstrates for the solution; the match between the product and the lead (geographical factors, availability, etc.); the budget of the lead’s organization (purchasing power); the authority of the contract (decision-making power); the timing of the sale and the interest.

Average ticket

The average ticket is the average of how much each customer spends with the company, a great metric to evaluate sales performance. The calculation of the average ticket is the sales volume in the period divided by the number of sales in the same period.

Revenue 

Revenue represents the capital inflows that result from a company’s activity when selling products or services: quantity of products or services sold × price.

ROI (Return on Investment)

ROI (return on investment) is the amount billed subtracted from the costs, divided by those costs.

Traffic 

Several visits to the website, can be measured and tracked daily or monthly: DAU (Daily Active Users) and MAU (Monthly Active Users). The traffic shows whether email, SEO, and social media efforts are generating good results, and indicates the best performing channels (traffic origin) and keywords in the campaign.

Returning Visitors/Total Visitors

Of the total website visitors, how many returned?

Average time on page

Average session length of visitors to the website or blog.

Website Conversion Rate

Of the total visitors, how many of them convert an action, namely: download an e-book, make a purchase, fill out a form? It is the conversion of website visitors into leads, whether qualified for Marketing or Sales.

The conversion rate of a CTA

Of the visitors to a page, how many of them click on a button (CTA: Call to Action)?

Click through rate on pages 

Of the visitors to a page, what percentage of them click on some link?

Pages per visit

How many pages are viewed per visit to the website or blog?

Amount of backlinks 

How many links on other (relevant) websites direct to your website?

Page Authority

Page authority is the measure of content quality and page relevance provided by analytical tools.

Google Pagerank

Page ranking on Google, calculated by Google from the use of various algorithms to determine the importance of pages.

Keywords in the TOP 10 SERP

Several keywords on the website cause it to be displayed among Google’s top 10 results.

Conversion Rate by Keyword 

Percentage of visitors attracted by the keyword that converted actions on the website.

Bounce Rate

Of the visitors to the website, how many of them access a page and after a few seconds left?

Traffic generated from social networks

Visitors to the website came from links on social networks.

Cost per Thousand (CPM)

CPM in digital marketing is an acronym for the performance metric “Cost per Thousand Impressions”, that is, what amount is being charged when ads are printed (displayed) a thousand times.

Click to Open (CTO)

The CTO is the number of clicks divided by the number of emails opened.

Social Engagement

Involvement of people with the brand through shares, comments, and mentions on social networks.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

The NPS measures customer satisfaction. It asks “from 0 to 10, how much would you refer our company to friends?” The formula for calculating NPS is the percentage of promoting customers (scores of 9 and 10) minus the percentage of detracting customers (scores of 0 to 6).

Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV)

CLTV is the prediction of the total amount of money a customer will spend during their relationship with the brand, i.e. the value a customer generates for a company over their lifecycle.

Sales Cycle Time

The time it takes to complete a sale.

Average Sales Conversion Time

The time, on average, that the Sales team takes to convert a sale

Customer Growth Rate

The percentage of customer growth from one month to the next, each quarter, semester, or year.

Brand Equity

Brand Equity is the set of associations and behaviors on the part of customers, channel members, and the brand’s parent company that allows the brand to earn greater volume or higher margins than it could without the brand name, and that gives it a strong, sustainable, and differentiated advantage over its competitors. (Source: Marketing Science Institute)

Brand value is the strength of a brand from the financial assets involved in it. An intangible differentiating effect, which, if positive, gives it a competitive advantage in the marketplace. Brand value can be determined from the financial results of a product about its prices; the brand value when introducing new products; and the brand value based on the thoughts, sensations, and habits of customers about the business.

In this context, the following variables also contribute to the success of a brand, making it valuable: Brand Knowledge, Brand Remembrance, Brand Image, Brand Recognition, and Brand Coherence, in addition to Brand Satisfaction.

Brand Knowledge is the level of familiarity of consumers with the product or service and the key to Brand Equity as it generates a differentiated response, and can be characterized into two components: Brand Remembrance and Brand Image.

Brand Remembrance is the ability of consumers to remember the brand unaided. Brand Image is how consumers see the brand, how they perceive what it represents, the associations they make with the brand and their feelings after interactions with the brand.

Brands with high Recognition are seen as trendy, popular, and prominent.

Consumer Satisfaction with a particular brand is a consequence of the feelings and thoughts regarding their experience with the brand and is directly linked to Brand Consistency, that is, the difference between the promises of the brand and the actual perception of it.

A satisfied customer can become an advocate for the brand, referring it to others.

Data-driven Marketing and Sales

Data-driven is a strategy of collecting, storing, and processing data, to generate insights, trends, and information about the business itself and the market. The management of this data helps transform knowledge into smarter actions and decisions

The company’s Marketing and Sales departments must analyze the data intelligently and make the best decisions. To do so, they must do some initial planning to identify all the conversion points.

The most important KPIs for those analyzing the data are:

• Click Through Rate (CTR) = click-through rate of an ad/email;
• Connect Rate = connectivity rate, which indicates how many clicks became sessions;
• Conversion Rates in the Marketing funnel: Visitors → Leads → Opportunities → Customers;
• Cost Per Lead (CPL);
• Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC).

Source: olia danilevich

Teams should also check whether the audience is accessing the website by mobile or laptop; what the conversion performance is by each browser type; and whether there is one channel that brings in more than 50% of the results.

Other relevant indicators are:

• Average Session Time on the website and Rejection Rate;
• Connection time with a server;
• SEO (Search Engine Optimization): evaluate traffic and integration with Google Search Console to compare results by period and identify specific keywords used to reach each content.

Regarding the Sales team, the five main KPIs to be looked at are:

• Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV); 
• Conversion Rates: from what enters the funnel to what leaves it;
• Percentage of the team that is reaching the target;
• Number of sales per salesperson;
• Sales pipeline movement.

Strengthen your brand through KPIs

KPIs make it possible to track and better manage the level of performance and success of the company’s strategies because they monitor the company’s health, measure progress, analyze patterns over time, and help the manager to make adjustments and stay on track, solve problems, and seize opportunities.

Thus, KPIs provide a diagnosis of the company, so that it can act on the problem and better position itself in the market.

Advantages of a strong brand: 

✔ Better perception of product or service performance;
✔ Greater loyalty;
✔ Less vulnerability to competitor marketing actions;
✔ Less vulnerability to crises;
✔ Higher margins;
✔ More inelastic consumer response to price increases;
✔ More elastic consumer response to price reductions;
✔ Greater cooperation of intermediaries;
✔ Greater effectiveness of communication and marketing programs;
✔ Licensing opportunities;
✔ Brand extension opportunities.

Strengthening brand value will only be possible by first understanding the audience’s behavior well, then measuring relevant KPIs and making recommendations for actions derived from them.