What KPI to Measure? The 3 Most Important KPIs You Should Be Tracking

In digital advertising, there’re a lot of marketing KPIs (key performance indicators) to track and they’re all important in their own way. They help us stay on the path and follow through on our commitments. But in truth, many of them don’t matter if they are not leading to REVENUE.

Essentially, if you’re not making money, then you need to start paying attention to the metrics that do matter. These are conversions, leads and sales. Let’s take a look.

1. Conversions

A conversion happens when a visitor completes any desired action or goal.

Imagine that you went to an online store for some new shoes. After about a minute of browsing, you see a popup that notes “hey, subscribe and get 30% off your order today!”

You do it and save money on your shoe purchases that day. The act of subscribing is a conversion and in our example, it led to a sale. To me, your conversion rate is the most important metric you can track for a website with sufficient traffic.

Even if you receive 10 visits per day, you should be tracking your conversions because that’s how you know that you’re hitting the right demographics.

If no one is doing the things you want them to do on your site, then a) you should be checking your web pages for optimization gaps and b) see where your traffic is coming from & whether you’re hitting the right audience.

Decide on the goals that you want to accomplish. Some examples are the number of email list subscribers, performance of CTA (call-to-action) buttons and incoming phone calls.

>> RELATED: How to Design Landing Pages That Convert

2. Leads

Do you have an opt-in form for capturing leads? Although I don’t recommend an excessive use of this strategy and here’s why: Content is mostly free online!

Thousands of blog posts get published daily (1,440 per second, according to Smart Insights), white papers, eBooks, guides etc.

So why would anyone enter their PII (personally identifiable information) because they want to download your content? Let’s be real with ourselves here, most people won’t do it.

In fact, most of the people who’ve subscribed to the Tech Help Canada newsletter didn’t come from our gated content. They just signed up on their own without any push from us.

Then there’s also this debacle: If no one is consuming or viewing your content, then it becomes a less valuable asset. That’s why it’s better to eliminate barriers to entry for content consumption. There’s just so much content out on the web today.

Most people discover content through search engines, which means that they can easily hit the back button if you can’t give them what they’re looking for. So if site A wants PII prior to access and site B just gives it away, then they’ll spend time on the latter.

I’m not suggesting that you should not have some gated content, just that it shouldn’t be excessively used.

3. Sales

At the end of the day, your total sales for the month/quarter or year will tell the whole story. Knowing how much revenue is generated helps you see how effective your marketing efforts are. No company wants to spend money on something that isn’t generating revenue.

That’s why you should revisit your marketing plan every year. Once you identify a strategy that isn’t working, you can replace it or move the budget to another strategy.