In yesterday’s blog post, we talked about the importance of measuring Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Today, we want to examine how best to use KPIs to create an agile, iterative campaign that maximizes your ROI.
As we illustrated in our last post, there are many KPIs to study depending your campaign (SEO, PPC, social media, Blogging, etc.); but these KPIs don’t exist in a vacuum. You need to constantly be analyzing the KPIs to see if you are improving or regressing.
Remember that the key to your success is an iterative campaign that is constantly changing in small ways. Over time, these little tweaks make a big impact on your traffic, lead generation, conversion and ROI.
Thanks to innovative marketing analytics software (we use Google Analytics as well as our own, National Analytics!), you have the power to see how your campaign is doing in real-time. As the data pours in, you need to see what your KPIs are doing and make iterations depending on what you see.
Let’s use a very common example.
Say you are managing several marketing campaigns to drive traffic and leads to your site. You are using SEO, PPC, Display Ads, and Social Media, and your traffic is way up. Great news, right? Well, not exactly. Your traffic has skyrocketed but your sales have not increased. So you’re not seeing the ROI that you need to make your business a true success.
You need to study the KPIs to know why traffic is up but sales are stagnant. What’s your conversion rate? What’s your visitors’ time on site? What’s your bounce rate? What’s your percentage of new visitors? All these KPIs will tell you a story, and you need to make changes to improve your results.
Perhaps you have determined that your landing pages are not strong enough. Armed with KPIs, you are going to split test several landing pages by changing various factors: the design, call to action, ad copy, product, unique selling proposition, etc. After 3-4 weeks, go back to your KPIs and see what they are. This should tell you what kind of landing pages to build. Ultimately, it is these small iterations that lead to a big boost in sales and ROI.
Not every iteration will prove to be successful. Each pivot is an assumption, but over time, your marketing team will be able to make enough pivots to get definitive answers and create a proven strategy that boosts sales.
There are various factors like seasonal spikes in website traffic or the economic climate that affect your KPIs. When you analyze KPIs, you will be able to make a more informed decision on what should change and what should stay constant. By making small changes, over time, they can add up to a big difference.