It’s time to Simplify your KPIs

How often do you track your key performance indicators? Or any of your metrics?

Metrics are so important to the growth of a brand. Having a good line of sight on the metrics for your brand is critical to align your work with your goals. If you don’t know what is or isn’t working, you won’t know what areas to prioritize and how to best use your resources.

I believe in tracking your metrics only on a monthly basis. That way you can see the real progress you are making. Tracking any more frequently and you lose focus on what’s important.

I’ve designed a system that not only simplifies your metrics but helps you prioritize your work. It’s designed to go with my Metrics Dashboard for Google Sheets. Get it here.

There are an endless amount of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that you can track for your brand. And with so much analytics and reporting built into the different software we use, it’s easy to track everything. But that can get overwhelming and make you lose focus on your goals. So we want to simplify that. Here is my simple three-tier tracking system, along with the top 3 metrics to track per marketing tool.

My Three-Tier Tracking System

There are three levels of marketing metrics to track that are important for the success - and health - of your brand.

1. Brand

I recommend tracking only three brand-level marketing KPIs that you use as a guidepost for how your business is doing against your top goals. Every business will have different goals. As a new business, you may be solely focused on brand awareness. Whereas an established business may want to focus on client retention. However, most will want to focus on the full marketing funnel - the path a person goes through as they engage with your brand. The know, like trust factor. If your data is always growing and improving in these areas, you know you are on the right path for your business.

• KNOW. First, you need people to be aware of your brand, know you exist, and then start following you. It’s making that good first impression that will move people from know to like.

• LIKE. Like is when the magic starts to happen. You start building a real connection with them. They are engaging with you on social media, clicking on your emails, sharing good things about your brand with their friends. It’s during this time that you start earning their trust.

• TRUST. You know you’ve gotten hooked when you’ve become a trusted source and they’ve become a customer, client or evangelist of your brand.

If your data is always growing and improving in these areas, you know you are on the right path for your business.

Think about how you move an audience through this funnel. What marketing tools are you putting most of your effort in? What does it mean for someone to trust your brand? What action is it that they take? This doesn’t have to be linear either or through one tool. While you can move people on Instagram from follower → to someone who comments and likes → and into your DMs where you can build a relationship there, you should think about your full marketing toolbox.

Here is mine as an example. This year I’m focused on building up my Instagram account and general brand awareness; building my brand coaching clientele via my email marketing; and selling my digital products. So here are the 3 metrics I’m tracking:

• Know: Instagram followers

• Like: Email open-rates

• Trust: Digital product landing page conversion rate

2. Campaigns

Every time you run a campaign or do a big launch, you want to track the success of it.

Before launching, determine your goals. What do you hope to achieve? For instance, if it’s an event, do you have an attendee goal? How engaged do you want the participants to be? Put real numbers to your goal so you can track the progress.

From there, you can figure out what data you will need to track. Can you pull the engagement rate from your Facebook Live? Do you need to do a post-event survey?

Tracking your campaign KPIs over time will help you assess if the return on your investment was good. Did you reach your goals? Is that campaign one that you should continue doing every quarter or every year. Or do you need to tweak future ones based on the results of your last one?

3. Marketing Tools

Finally, you want to track your marketing tools regularly (website, social, email, ads, etc) to ensure they are healthy and performing as they should. Is your bounce rate high on your website? Are your unsubscribe rates much higher than normal? Did the costs of your ads skyrocket?

Again, there is an endless number of metrics to track per tool. But here, we just want to focus on data that would flag the need for adjustments to be made. While nice, we don’t track metrics just to pat ourselves on the back. We do it so that we better understand the performance of our brand. So that we can assess what is working and what isn’t and make adjustments necessary to stay on track to meet our goals.

Top KPIs to Track

While this is not an exhaustive list of KPIs to track, here are my top three metrics per marketing tool to track.

Website

• Unique Visitors

• Time on Site

• Conversion Rate

Email Marketing

• Mailing List Size

• Open Rate

• Click Rate

Social Media

• Followers/Likes

• Engagements

• Impressions/Reach

Webinar or Events

• Registrants or Attendees

• Attendee Engagement

• Attendee Satisfaction

SEO

• Organic Traffic

• Keyword Rank

• Backlinks

Ads

• Click-thru Rate

• Leads or Purchases

• Cost Per Click

Earned Media

• Media Mentions

• Quality of Media Mentions

• Placement Rate

Are you ready to track your progress using my Simplify Your KPIs System? Grab the Metrics Dashboard here!