Let’s face it: Being an in-house marketer isn’t always sunshine and rainbows—especially when it comes to budgets, overarching strategies, and brand consistency through it all. You can prove your worth all day long to your team and your colleagues, but if your digital marketing KPIs don’t tie back to your company’s current business goals, your strategies may not be impacting the bottom line enough to truly impress the people who count.
Translate Business Goals into KPIs
How can you translate business goals into KPIs, all while staying true to who you are as a brand and as a digital marketer? It’s not always easy to spin something as creative as marketing into a goal crushing-machine, but when it comes to digital advertising, we’ve got a few tricks up our sleeves.
Digital marketing KPIs & business goals: Friends, not foes
It’s time to break down the silos between marketing and other business functions. Read on to find three common business goals, their top marketing KPIs, and what you should measure to help you get there.
Business goal: Increase revenue
KPI: Increase the number of qualified leads (or sales)
Measurement: CPA
CPA, or cost-per-acquisition, is a digital advertising measurement that will tell you how many conversions your campaign has gained. In e-commerce, the CPA will—more than likely—represent a dollar amount that you can tie directly into sales, but here we’ll relate it more to B2B and receiving qualified leads.
If your conversion event is a demo signup, for example, whenever someone comes to your site and signs up through that ad it counts as a conversion. And when your campaign is doing its job, it not only brings in more leads, but with the right targeting, messaging, and creative, it will bring in people who are more likely to be your ideal customer. Ultimately, this leads to increased revenue.
Business goal: Capture more market share
KPI: Increase traffic/awareness
Measurement: Win rate and/or CTR (click-through-rate)
Win rate is a digital advertising measurement that can be tracked throughout the lifetime of a campaign. When your win rate is between 10 and 30 percent, that means your campaign is on track to spend the budget evenly, and in its entirety, which is a good thing. CTR measures how many times your ad is clicked, divided by the number of times it was shown.
The reason you’ll want to look at win rate along with CTR for the KPI of increasing awareness is two-fold. 1. You want to win the right amount of advertising inventory in order to 2. Get your ideal audience to visit your site or landing page. If you’re winning the right amount of inventory, and again, your campaigns are targeted correctly—you’re sure to capture that sweet spot of win rate, along with higher quality clicks, that will lead to increased market share over time.
Business goal: Increase sales
KPI: Number of conversions
Measurement: ROAS for retargeting campaigns
Retargeting is king if increasing sales is your top priority. We recommend running one retargeting ad group for each campaign, paying close attention to the number of conversions you gain from that campaign versus others. If your retargeting campaign is connecting with consumers, that conversion rate should be higher than non-retargeting display ads.
Another positive about retargeting? It’s king for brand building. Reaching back out to someone who has previously expressed an interest in your brand, in a meaningful way, is good practice if you’re looking to build longer-term relationships with customers. Ultimately, all of the above are best practices that will lead to increased sales.
Nothing’s more impressive than when you translate business goals into KPIs, but doing so in a way that saves both you and your company serious time and resources takes the cake. Dive even deeper into strategies for efficiency with this blog post on building awesome audiences for campaign efficiency.
