Key Performance Indicators for your Business

Know the key performance indicators- metrics to use in your business– facts and nothing but the facts.

Key Performance Indicators– they sound scary, right.

But have you ever wondered if your business is on target to meet your quarterly or annual goals? Do you wait until the last minute to check? Are you winging it by just throwing random content out there praying someone, somewhere might hear you and buy your product or service? Any idea if you are successful or what’s working? I get it. It can be totally disheartening even gut-wrenching, when you have to face the fact that your business is not meeting the goals or revenue that you had envisioned. But, do you know why? Can you tell… if you have a funnel problem? A traffic problem? Is Social Media doing you wrong? How do you know what to measure? Here’s a fact. An ugly fact. But you have to create your KPI goals and start measuring. Simple stuff so that you can make forward progress, gain that momentum, and keep running– right. Well here is a list of things to measure— chop, chop.

General Business KPI Metrics

Brand Awareness: measures how familiar your audience and target audience is around your product/service
Customer Lifetime Value: during the lifetime of your customer how much revenue will they generate?
Customer Acquisition Cost: What it actually costs to acquire said customer
Return on Investment: Revenue is generated per dollar spent on marketing.
Conversion Rate: How many peoples or conversions you get from a simple optin, etc. The percentage of visits that result in the desired action (like completing a form or making a purchase).
Leads Generated: How many sales leads have you generated

Website and Blogging KPI Metrics

Referral Traffic: How many visits are you getting from another source- search, email, social media
Organic Traffic: Unpaid traffic driven through search engines.
Total Visits: How many hit have you gotten over a time period
Customer Churn: the attrition rate of your customers
First Visit: When a new potential customer lands on your website for the first time.
Returning Visits: All hits from visitors who have been to your site before.
Click-Through Rate: The percent of search engine queries that result in a click to your site.
Time on Page: The average amount of time visitors spend on a webpage before leaving.
Bounce Rate: Tracks visitors who only view one page on your site before exiting.
Downloads: The number of times downloadable assets and freebies are downloaded (like ebooks, templates, and other gated content).
Pageviews Per Session: The number of pages an average visitor views on your site before leaving.
Unique Visitors: The number of individual users that arrive on your site.
Sessions By Device Type: How many visits a site receives, broken down by the type of device people used to access it (ex: Mac, Windows PC, iPhone, etc.).
Pageviews: The total number of pages that have been viewed on a site.
Top Pages: The pages that are driving the best performance, either by traffic, or conversion rate.

SEO KPI Metrics

Keyword Rankings: How high a page ranks in search engines for a given keyword.
Search Traffic: The amount of referral traffic sent to a site through a search engine.
SERP Visibility:
Total Backlinks: The number of links pointing at a web page from other sites.
Domain Authority: Measures how authoritative search engines view an entire website.
Page Authority: Measures how authoritative search engines view a single webpage.
Page Load Speed: How fast a website loads (which may impact search engine rankings).
Organic Click Through Rate: How often searchers click a given page when it appears in search engine results.

Social Media Marketing KPI Metrics

Likes: The number of clicks on post Like buttons.
Comments: The number of comments on your posts.
Shares: The number of times a post has been shared. Also called retweets on Twitter or Repins on Pinterest.
Engagement Rate: Measures the level of interaction happening between a social media profile and its audience.
Follower Growth Rate: How quickly a profile is gaining new followers.
New Followers: The number of new fans or followers earned over a given period of time.
Social Media Traffic: Website or blog traffic driven by social media platforms.
Social Media Conversions: Website or blog conversions from social media referral traffic.
Page Demographics: A breakdown of demographic data based on a profile’s followers, based on age, sex, location, occupation, etc.
Sentiment: Measures how social media audiences feel about your brand.

Email Marketing KPI Metrics

Newsletter Signups: The number of people who have opted in to your mailing list.
Traffic: Website or blog traffic referred through email marketing.
Subscribers: The number of people who subscribe to your mailing list.
Engagement: Measures engagement factors such as clicks and opens.
Opens: The number of people who opened your email in their inbox.
Clicks: The number of people who clicked a link in an email.
Bounce Rate: The number of emails that could not be delivered.
Forwards: How many times an email was forwarded to another user.

PPC KPI Metrics

Cost Per Click (CPC): The cost of getting one click on an ad.
Click-Through Rate (CTR): Measures how many people click an ad, based on how many times it appears.
Quality Score: Used to determine an ad’s relevancy based on keywords, search intent, and the quality of the destination page.
Impression Share: The number of impressions ads receive, measured against the total number of impressions they were eligible to receive.
Total Conversion Value: The total monetary value of all conversions over a period of time.
Return on Ad Spend (ROAS): The amount of revenue generated measured against the amount spent.
Call Tracking: The number of calls placed after click an ad.

List courtesy of coschedule.com

So are you ready?

You are probably saying– you gotta be kidding me. I need to measure all that? Did your brain just go into overwhelm? Hopefully, you are still reading! 🙂 The real answer is no– at least not right away. I mean seriously most of us are solo-entrepreneurs or with a very small team so trying to measure all of this is just over the top. I want you to focus on those key metrics that will help you move your business forward.

Here are my recommendations for your key performance indicators:

Revenue-– this one is really a no-brainer and I don’t know anyone that isn’t tracking their revenue. A word of warning though, just don’t focus on total revenue- break it down to your various channels. That way you will have a clear picture of where you are growing, where you need to course-correct, and where things are really humming. Expenses- I know, this one gives me heart palpitations every month when I look at my expenses. But, you need that full picture. A rule of thumb is that your expenses should be about 30%. This includes any salaries, software costs, ad costs– truly anything and everything that is a cost of running your business. Profit = Revenue – Expenses Cost per lead – this one is important but it shouldn’t be used in a vacuum. Looking at your cost per lead is important but don’t kill a marketing campaign just because your cost per lead is high– look at what those individuals are spending as well. Here’s how to calculate your Cost per Lead

Add up your marketing spend
Add up your total leads
Divide your marketing spend by new leads

Total Marketing Spend /Total New Leads = Cost per Lead (CPL Website Traffic– basic metric is to understand how many peeps are visiting your site and where they are coming from. You want to track page views, and your unique visitors to start with. This will give you an idea. But ultimately you will want to know where they are coming from– direct, referral or organic and what they are actually doing on your site. Do they signup for an optin, reading your BLOG posts, looking at your courses, pricing. The more your know– the more you will understand how to explode your business. Landing Page Conversions- you need to know if the optins on your website, in Facebook Ads are converting. This will let you know if the content you are publishing is connecting with your audience. If not, try an A/B test to see if your copy is off, the picture, or layout. When doing your A/B test though make sure you are only testing one change at a time otherwise you will never fully understand what’s working. See- it’s not that bad. 🙂 I mean there is a lot more we should be tracking but if you set up these basic metrics you will have a strong foundation to build on. And you will finally know what’s working and what’s not working. The best news– you won’t ever throw money at a bad marketing campaign.