Part of the planning and development of a company, without a doubt, is to carry out the action steps to know what works and what does not. These performance metrics are called KPIs or key performance indicators.

They can be an excellent tool and enable us to achieve great results.

Let us begin by defining what KPIs are, their characteristics, and the best KPIs you can choose to focus on.

What are KPIs?

It refers to the units of measurements that help us know how a strategy or action performs under a project in your company. We establish them by comparing specific results with the set objectives and the level of compliance.

As KPIs use percentages, graphs, and tables, the reports become easy to understand. For example, a company can have a percent graph of satisfaction of their clients and compare it with the annual sales, number or ratio of complaints, and other measurable concepts.

In addition, they allow us to obtain a global vision of the company's situation and help define more precisely the areas of competence and opportunities of the teams within the company individually and in groups.

Every company that wants to be successful must be interested in what happens within it about the excellent communication and inter-relationships that their marketing, sales, customer service teams keep. This tool helps measure both the internal actions and the results they produce externally, affecting their success.

What characteristics should a KPI have?

There are general characteristics that every Key Performance Indicator (KPI) should meet to be practical and functional and, in this way, offer the best possible results in your marketing strategies.

Some of them are linked to SMART goals:

Specific: They must be clear, with well-founded concepts, that do not leave room for doubts or interpretations that may make them vary

Measurable: They must yield results in numbers, since only in this way will it be possible to check whether they are being met or not

Achievable: They must be attached to the reality that each company experiences. Losing objectivity will make them useless or at least not very functional, so it would not be an effective investment

Realistic: We must take care that they are practical, according to the current state of our country and our company

Relevant: The data we are measuring should be important both for constant improvement and for implementing or adjusting marketing strategies

Time-bound: A result may not count if it is not achieved within a fixed deadline; therefore, the KPIs must be time-bound and come with a timeline.

There are different KPIs, and each company can choose the best ones to evaluate their marketing strategies. We will learn more to choose the best ones.

How to choose the best KPIs?

We will review the KPIs for marketing strategies, which are the best known and, therefore, the most used. We will give the main points of each one to help you quickly recognize the ones that support your projects the most.

Before moving on to the related topic, I think it is essential to mention that we must correctly define our objectives to achieve them. In the life of a company, as in personal life, it is necessary to remember that the best way not to go anywhere is not to set a destination, that is, not to have objectives or goals. That means leaving our course to chance and circumstances.

On the other hand, when an objective is defined, in addition to the motivation to achieve it, it seems that things are arranged to be completed. The truth is that it is an orderly and coherent work that leads to good results.

All companies must establish marketing strategies based on their objectives, on the results they have obtained, on the achievement of achievements, their stability, and even the improvement of the data that is achieved with these KPIs, as well as the metrics concerning what they expect as the highest or optimal level that was defined in advance.

That is the main reason for the existence and use of KPIs, since the information they provide is of very high precision and quality, as long as the right ones are chosen for each company.

The time has come to meet some of them, keep reading, what follows next I know you will like!

KPI types

KPIs in Online Marketing: Once you have established your objectives, you have created filters not to count your own visits and exclude visits from phantom traffic on your website. Ideally, you evaluate the traffic of your website. For this, it would be ideal for you to take into account the following KPI's:

Traffic KPI's

  • Number of visits to your website
  • Number and percentage of new visitors and repeat visitors
  • Time spent on your website
  • Number of page views per session
  • Bounce Rate
  • Percentage of visits by area of influence (potential clients by country and city)
  • Percentage of traffic by age and gender of people who visit your website (are they your Target Audience?)
  • Interests and affinities of your audience
  • Frequency of internet connection concerning your website
  • Traffic from devices and screen resolutions (computer / mobile phone/tablet)

Acquisition and behavior KPI's

  • Number of visits with and without conversion (applying segmentation)
  • Number of visits with and without transactions
  • Number of subscribers (ideally if you use an email marketing platform)
  • Number of times your Url shared on Social Networks
  • Percentage of traffic from each source, media, and main visiting channels
  • Number and percentage of views from organic traffic
  • Number and percentage of visits from direct
  • Number and percentage of visits from Social Media
  • Number and percentage of visits from Reference
  • Number and percentage of visits from Paid Traffic
  • Top landing pages and most visited content
  • Number of visits and conversions
  • Number of links (Referral) and number of quality visits and conversions they generate
  • Main links: number and quality of visits through them (referred traffic)
  • Traffic from devices and screen resolutions (computer / mobile phone/tablet)
  • Number of comments, opinions and recommendations on your blog

Conversion and Attribution KPI's

  • Number of intermediate objectives met (non-commercial: time spent, navigation, registrations, events, etc.)
  • Number of macro conversions (transactions or specific actions on your website)
  • Number of steps in the conversion funnels
  • Number of visits and routes of objectives and conversion
  • Number of marketing objectives met (products, coupons, affiliates, etc.)
  • Number of visits from the primary converters according to traffic
  • Number of assisted conversions
  • Percentage of attributions in the conversion process to each channel
  • Time frame (in days) to get the conversions

KPI's if you link Google Ads and Google Analytics

  • Campaign performance percentage (global and detailed)
  • Percentage of improvement to make bid adjustments
  • Percentage of keyword performance in ads (which ones produce the most conversions)
  • Number of search engine inquiries, percentage and positioning of each term
  • Number of clicks in which clicks and conversions occur, depending on the time, day of the week and month
  • Performance percentage of display campaigns
  • Percentage of performance of video campaigns

KPI's for ROI and Conversions

  • Number and percentage of organic conversions through Search Engines
  • Number and percentage of conversions through campaigns of Payment Campaigns in Google Ads and RRSS
  • Number and percentage of conversions through links (Referrals and Affiliates)
  • Number of transactions (if you have an e-commerce)
  • Number and percentage of conversions through Social Networks (organic and paid)
  • In Funnels, the number of steps before and after a conversion
  • Time-lapse (in days between the first click of an ad, for example, and the conversion or transaction.)
  • Percentage of conversions by Conversion Paths (channels that users made before a conversion)
  • Day, date and time in relation to the number of conversions (for example in Google Ads).
  • Number of conversions for each channel
  • Landing pages with the highest conversion rate

Technical and SEO KPIs on your website with Google Search Console

All Google Search Console reports can be downloaded and are ideal for establishing direct positioning guidelines and objectives and are more exact than those offered by the Google Analytics platform itself in the Acquisition section.

Both the Search Analysis report, as well as the Content Keywords report, offer you a complete list of search terms, keywords, search engine queries and visits to your website through referred links, associated with the positioning and CTR of each one of them, for defined periods.

Other Search console resources, such as PageSpeed Insights, allow you to see the evolution of your SEO On-Page actions and speed optimization and draw a month-by-month comparison of the images and content you have optimized concerning the loading speed of your website.

Search Console KPI

  • Number of HTML improvements: pages with content issues
  • Improved Accelerated Mobile Pages results: pages with errors and pages indexed
  • Improved CTR and Positioning of Search Analysis terms
  • Improvement and increase of visits by external links, in quality and quantity
  • Number of internal links (and operation)
  • Number of pages indexed by Google
  • Improvement of pages blocked by Google. (if you have any blocked)
  • Improved indexing and correction of crawl errors (if you have them)
  • PageSpeed Insights improves the loading speed results of your website on different devices

Community or audience KPI's on Facebook

  • Number of New followers per week
  • Number of organic and paid likes (if you carry out promotional campaigns)
  • Number of dislikes (unlike) per week or month
  • Where Likes occurred: on your page, as a suggestion from another page, through your posts, etc.

KPI's of scope and impact of communication on Facebook

  • Improvement in the total reach of your publications: Number of people who were shown some activity on your page: publications
  • Improvement in the reach of your organic publications (number of people reached)
  • Improvement in the reach of your paid publications (number of people reached)
  • Improved Interactions with your publications: reactions, comments and times they were shared
  • Improvement in the number of emotional reactions: I like it, I love it, it amazes me, it saddens me, it makes me angry, etc.
  • Improvement in the number of negative reactions: dislike, hide from feed, disable notifications, remove tag or report as spam (if it happens)
  • Number of other people's posts on your page (if allowed)
  • Number of opinions about you by the people who like your page
  • Number of mentions of your page by users
  • Number of registered visits

KPI's of visits to your Facebook page

  • Total number of visits to your page
  • Number of visits per section of your page (publications, information, contact, opinions, photos, events, etc.)
  • Number of visits by age and gender (sex)
  • Number of visits by country or city
  • Number of visits per device (computers or mobile devices and tablets)
  • Number of main sources of visits (blogs, websites, other Facebook pages, publications, etc.)

KPI's of actions on your Facebook page

  • Number of people who clicked on information on the page
  • Number of people who clicked on the page's phone
  • Number of people who clicked on "how to get there" (physical address)
  • Number of people who clicked on the website of the page 

KPI's of your Facebook posts

  • Number of impressions of your post (number of people who viewed your post)
  • Organic / paid reach percentage improvement (number of people who saw and interacted with your post)
  • Reach followers and non-followers of your page
  • Number of participations in your publication: number of clicks, number of comments, number of views shared
  • Percentage of participation
  • Improved participation and interaction events
  • Videos: number of views
  • Number of video views longer than 3 seconds and longer than 10 seconds

KPI's of your audience on Facebook

  • Number of followers
  • Improvement in the percentage of the target audience by age and gender of your followers
  • Optimization of the number of target followers by country, city and language of your followers
  • People reached through your publications: followers and non-followers (gender, age and origin)
  • Number of people who interacted with your publications, followers and non-followers (gender, age and origin)
  • Number of people who saw your posts near your company within 50 meters: followers and non-followers (gender age)
  • Number of messages and responses to the inbox and conversion rate through Facebook
  • Improved response time to messages

YouTube KPI's

  • Increase in the percentage of most popular videos (with more reproductions)
  • Number of reproductions
  • Number of likes/dislikes
  • Number of comments
  • Improvement in the percentage of viewing time
  • Number of subscriptions to the channel that each video generated
  • Number of times shared on social networks from YouTube

KPIs are useful tools for any company

Regardless of what industry your organization belongs to, KPIs can be very valuable in the hands of project leaders, managers, and supervisors. Getting started could be the difference between a regular company and an outstanding one, so it is worth knowing how to apply them!

How to find out the right KPIs?

Surely, with what you have read so far, the elements that you could measure through a KPI could have already given you a headache.

The examples can be as many and as varied as wanting to know how many are your weekly, biweekly or monthly sales, the efficiency of customer service by your teams, the exact behavior of your suppliers; the likes of your social media posts, the number of comments and how many people read your content.

This list could go on, as KPIs yield a lot of information. You can even get data on the likes, preferences and demographics of those who visit your website.

Even with so much data that can be collected, the ideal is to have less complicated KPIs so that you can keep it real. A very complex one can create confusion and give inaccurate or difficult to interpret data.

What should be considered when choosing a KPI?

For a KPI to be useful, it must answer four basic questions:

What is the object to be measured?

Here you define what you want to measure and why; for example, number of sales, visits to your site, average customer increase, bounce rate, and so on.

What objective or goal do you want to achieve?

It is very important to know what you have achieved, but we must not forget that it is even more important to know what you want to achieve, how far you want to go, and how long.

What is the specific factor that you want to measure?

For example, if we have a company with different branches, then the specific factor will be to know if you want to have general data of the company or by branch; or if you want to measure a particular product or global sales.

What will be the source of information and data?

With the interaction that technology allows us with clients, it is necessary to review from whom we will receive information: collaborators, sales agents and supervisors, or from the client, with their shared experiences and with information received by the customer service or after-sales area.

Benchmarking, assistant of KPIs

In addition to the KPIs, there are some other tools that are useful to make a study or balance of our company since they allow us to simplify the complexity of some processes and can help us make better decisions. One of them is Benchmarking.

Benchmarking is the practice of comparing business processes and performance metrics with the best practices of other companies within the same industry.

We will be able to know how competitive we are, the quality offered by our products, the time it takes to manufacture, its cost, and delivery to the final consumer.

This benchmarking process focuses on identifying peer companies within the same industry and compares the results that these companies have had with the processes they use, in contrast to their own results. These processes range from the forms of hiring and training to production processes and business processes.

The following questions could guide us regarding what we can expect from a benchmarking analysis:

  • What is the behavior of your company with respect to your competition?
  • Are you achieving superior, inferior, or generally equal performance to other companies according to the industry standards to which you belong?
  • Is your company meeting the objectives to continue growing and operating successfully?

Reports of evaluation results of specific areas and processes are important; however, it should not be overlooked that a deep look at the company as a whole is essential to set directions and make adjustments, if necessary.

KPIs can be considered ideal complements to Benchmarking, as both are perfectly suited to motivate employees by giving them achievable goals.

By reaching these goals, employees help increase the overall performance of the company. So, if both are used to measure performance, surely, it will be possible to get the greatest amount of useful and quality data so that your company can be the best in its field.

Benchmarking can be a one-time event, but it is often treated as an ongoing process in which organizations continually seek to improve their practices.

And just as the application of KPIs to measure internal results, benchmarking analysis can be continuous evaluations or applied with the periodicity that each branch requires.

To conclude, we can say that KPIs have an ever more relevant role in all types of companies, such as tourism, transport, education, and human resources.

This is because implementing them means being able to access efficient information management and make it available in an affordable way so that administrators can study it and thus make better decisions.

At Tabscap, our team of specialists will gladly guide you if you have any questions. We even provide consultation on how to unify the management of your information and articulation of mechanisms. We help you grow!

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