A lot of people must have heard or read the abbreviation, KPI at places, but what is it, what does it signify? Let us read through to understand it better. KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) are incorporated by various organizations to keep track of or measure their progress in achieving the desired goal in the sphere of their channels. KPI is a metric system that involves specific, numerical metrics to measure the flow.
What Is KPI or Key Performance Indicator?
While in the field of digital or content marketing key performance indicators (KPIs) have changed a lot with the understanding of web analytics which helps deliver a better ROI on the plan. It has become like a piece of cake for many digital marketers with the use of various tools such as Google Analytics, Omniture, etc. Because all you need is the use of simple and relevant Key Performance Indicators for marketing effectiveness measurement and proper evaluation of the ROI of your content.
Since digital marketing, content is the key, especially when we talk about B2B or SEO. However, marketers mostly fail to measure the effectiveness in a profound and better way. Sticking to the same old strategy will not work in today’s world. While they say, “Content is the king”, one should not rely on the content as a whole. Marketers should follow various tactics that can measure the perfect effectiveness, which in turn elevates the goal. Not every campaign ends up with great results, but with proper key performance indicators, the marketers can calculate and channelize the campaigns properly for an expected outcome.
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Overall, as expert Dennis Mortensen says, “A KPI: 1) Echoes organization goals, 2) is decided by management, 3) provides context, 4) creates meaning on all levels of the all organizational levels, 5) is based on legitimate data, 6) is easy to understand and 7) leads to action!”
If you’re planning to make this work a set a KPI for your campaign, then all you have to do is find the numbers to where you want to pave a path and then use those numbers to get the best out of it.
When And How To Use KPI?
Your content is exposed to a variety of audiences and you should make sure that it reaches each kind of them. While building your way (defining the metrics), you should also understand when and where to use them. You need to understand the basics of the conversion funnel (the AIDA) to be able to estimate content performance or effectiveness during each stage.
What Is Conversion Funnel?
Now, what is the conversion funnel or AIDA and what it has to with your content and KPIs? This is a probable question in your mind, so let us get to it. When you are planning a new campaign or content, keep the conversion funnel in your mind. How do you want to make the most out of it by measuring the performance at each step of the funnel? For a general conversation, we need to create an awareness. Your audience should be aware of what is the content or what is the campaign, and if not, you need to make them aware because, without awareness, you cannot go to the next step.
The next step calls for interest. To keep your content engaging, you should be able to pull your audiences’ interest and how that would happen? Only if the audience is well aware and then your content helps them understand and learn better, you seek their interest. It is all connected because interest takes you the next step, the third step, Desire.
When your audience is aware and has developed an interest, there will be a desire of more and of course, you’re getting fruitful with your content, you are getting your way and that leads to action which is the last or the fourth step.
The final step says that if your campaign or content had a favorable outcome. So you see, all these are connected. Keeping the funnel at the top of your mind and calculating the effectiveness of each step and thus, preparing well for the next, will help you deliver proper content. This will, as a result, will help you reach the goal you’d set, the purpose behind your content.
Setting Up The KPIs
While this is the basic knowledge of how to shape your metrics, further, we will learn, all you need to know about setting KPIs as per your type of business. But before that, let us get an in-depth knowledge of a user’s path in the conversion funnel paired with the metrics and how fruitful is it for the same. Studying the various charts of Content KPI by Portent which speaks that the strategy has 3 goals to which the audience would reach the end of the funnel, conversion, reputation, and engagement.
These goals have few absolute KPIs which can also be widely used. Incorporating these in the strategy gives the perfect measure of the content and help to create more goal-oriented or audience-focused content. We will further discuss various Content KPIs and their yields.
Conversion KPIs
Including Leads, Transactions, Revenue, and Goal Completion. If the content is meant to generate leads, say, for example, you design campaign to bring more audience to your page, you need to keep track, you need to calculate the number of it. If you’re bringing the audience to your page, the next step is you need to examine the transaction, like the audience is actually participating or investing in the same. Further, if you use revenue KPI, you need to set your metrics it will vary with each user’s expenditure. For your goal completion, you can use Google Analytics to set goals for your business and track the conversions. It might not always be a monetary goal, but you can still track it as per your requirements.
Reputation KPIs
This includes Influencer Mentions, Keyword ranking, Sentiment analysis, and Share of Voice. Influencer marketing is a thing today and the number of mentions can boost your reputation. Tracking the mentions is super easy with various apps available. With targeted keyword and proper optimization, IE., SEO brings your content ahead and creates awareness. This method surely is easier to track with SEO tools to monitor all content campaigns. Share of Voice is related to Keyword tracking and focuses on how visible it is. Sentiment analysis involves complexity but can be taken up major brands to incorporate this technique (uses artificial intelligence technology) to track content campaigns.
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Engagement KPIs
This term includes comments, Scroll depth, Time on Page, and Page per session. Comments or feedback are the best way to track as it speaks of what the end person relates to. The scroll depth will tell how engaged the audience on your page is, whether they are reading the content. Time on Page is obvious and like the scroll depth tactic, where the audience’s presence is recorded in seconds. Pages per session tell the number of pages a user visits or just skips away.
How Keys Performance Indicators Are Related To Each Other?
While the above three are the basic KPIs, let us talk about combining each of them with the other.
Return Customers
These are the audience that comes back to the content because they like it. This is a conjunction of the Conversion and Reputation KPIs. It can be difficult to track this, but surely, Google Analytics can give you a hand with this.
Likes, Shares, and Backlinks
This comes from the intersection of Reputation and Engagement KPIs. Social media is the best way to track the number of likes and share your content. This can be used along with promotion and can be monitored as per the response. A proper recommendation is one of the best tracking ways. You know your content is recommended when you can track backlinks to your content.
Open and Click-Through Rates
An intersection of Engagement and Conversion KPIs, these are mainly tailored for email marketing and other promotion where you can check the audience brought to your content campaign through various clicks and links.
Combining the major three KPIs, page views help build a reputation. Pageviews are the best and easiest and at the same time the laziest way to measure the audience on the content effectiveness.
These are the major KPIs that help evaluate the effectiveness of content. It takes patience and skillful strategy to extract the best of it. There’s no one correct way to achieve it, but plan, purpose and implement while playing along by setting goals, planning KPIs, and iterating to find the best for your content.
Which Is The Right KPI For Your Company: B2B, B2C, Marketing Agency, Content Publisher
Before closing the article, let us throw some light on the KPIs to be considered according to the type of business. We will look into the following organizations and the KPIs best suited for them.
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Business to Consumer (B2C) company.
Business to Business (B2B) company.
Marketing Agency.
Content Publisher.
Business to Consumer (B2C) Company Content KPIs
For these organizations, the main aim is to reach more audiences or customers to make the sale. Here the hero metric is sales and revenue. The KPIs measure the money and the profit they are making. Mainly they consider sales, social engagements, and user engagements as the main KPIs. There are other secondary KPIs that back the primary ones and these marked by the boost of sales. The reason smaller organizations consider the secondary KPIs is because the effectiveness is measured quickly.
Business to Business (B2B) Company Content KPIs
These kinds of organizations are more about partnerships and take a lot of time to close taking into account the number of meetings and discussions for the business to run. The goals in this case are achieved through leads. The lead generations are the conversions and important element for the KPIs. B2Bs consider promotions and consider digital marketing and the measure of KPIs is as such.
Marketing Agency Content KPIs
These agencies are more of social media posts, blog posts, or white papers, which may or may not make the sales. The effectiveness is not easily measured, however, in the early stage it works when the new products are introduced to the audience. The KPIs used are almost as the B2B and B2C organizations that are sales, business, user and social engagement, SEO, while the secondary KPIs vary. Here, more focus is on the awareness and popularity that lead to higher SERP rankings.
Publisher Content KPIs
The target for publishers like newspapers, magazines, blogs is an advertisement. An attractive layout draws advertisers to their site/page/paper. The KPIs used are the same, however, the tracking is done in a slightly different manner. They have paid subscriptions to track the income while the traffic on the sites is recorded to keep an eye on the number of visitors and hence play around the work of visibility.
The Final Take
Although a lot of KPIs and strategies have been listed yet, all you have to have is a plan of your own. A plan that is best suited for your work. A plan that is best suited for your business. Always go with what metrics are yielding you better and not what you think is beneficial for the company. Sometimes the ones that are trending might draw your attention, but you should stick to what KPIs would yield you a better result and help you reach your company’s goal. Understanding your business and your audience before drawing the metrics is the key.
The ultimatum is to increase your company’s or brand’s reach which will be spoken by the lead generation or sale or the engagement as per the background of your business. However, planning the KPIs properly will get you where you want to be.
