Marketing KPIs and Tracking | Accelerator
Marketing KPIs and Tracking
‘Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.’
As one of the founding fathers of the American Retail Industry, John Wannamaker has a good point. When you start your entrepreneurial journey, you will have limited resources and each penny will need to be spent wisely.
Once you set the marketing funnel, now it is time for you to set your KPIs regarding each activity in your funnel. Remember that if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. Therefore let’s understand how to set the KPIs and track them.
For start, you only need an excel file or a Google docs document to keep track of your activities. You need to categorize the file with these topics:
Funnel – Which phase of the funnel does this activity belong?
Desired Result – What action do you desire to get in this phase?
Communication Channel – Which channel are you using for this activity?
KPI – What are the criterias for success?
Tracking – How will you track these success criterias?
Let’s go over some examples so that you get a better understanding:
Funnel >> In this example we are currently dealing with the Acquisition phase. To refresh your mind, it is the phase where you are bringing users / customers to your website / application.
Desired Result >> As we are in the Acquisition phase, we are interested in the sign-ups for our website. So the desired result will be ‘Sign-up’ action.
Communication Channel >> In this example, let’s consider Social Media channels. We’’d like to track their performance and KPIs.
KPI >> To recap, we are in the Acquisition phase therefore we are targeting to bring as much users / customers as possible from social media channels. In this case, any activity on social media needs to have;
- High Reach
- High Click-through Rate (CTR)
This means that we reach a wide audience and make sure that they are clicking on our posts.
That’s why for the KPI part, we will make sure that we have ‘Increase in reach of the posts’ and also ‘Increase in CTR’. These two criterias will act as our basis.
Tracking >> We have set the KPIs. Now it is time to decide on the tools that will help us to measure these KPIs.
For ‘Increase in reach of the posts’, we can use ‘Social Media Analytics’ provided by each medium that we will use. As an example you can check the analytics feature of Facebook and get your reach number.
For ‘Increase in CTR’, we need to track the traffic sources therefore we need to put UTM trackings in our links so that we can see these traffics in Google Analytics. No worries if you are not familiar with terms like UTM, Google Analytics etc..as you will learn about them in the Digital Marketing sections of EntreLaunch.
Now our Marketing KPI template is ready. You can continue adding more and more activities depending on the related phases. The good thing is that once you start filling this template, you can also add the budget column therefore start evaluating if the related channel is working towards your KPIs or not. In my experience, this template also helps you to build your marketing efforts in a more solid foundation. As an entrepreneur, prior to forming your team, you may need to deal with marketing by yourself. In this case if you keep a track of your activities in this KPI template, once you hire a marketing colleague you can give him/her an overview of the marketing dynamics for your company.