Entrepreneurs work passionately on creation, developing new ideas & designing, which are one side of the growth coin – the other side is commercialization. The knowledge of Digital Marketing helps to achieve commercial goals & as an aware startup founder one will have power over not letting digital marketing agencies take you for a ride. Digital Marketing has become the need of the hour for everyone. Everyone is striving to capture a new share in the market; this has shown us a rise in entrepreneurship.
But in all of this, there’s also a saddening story to tell. Even though thousands of startups evolve every day, there are about 3/4ths of them getting shut too. There are innumerable reasons to it. But if we have to analyze it from a digital marketing point of view, it is critically important for all the startup founders to understand the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Founders cannot survive the growth without understanding the KPIs in depth.
A lot of digital marketing agencies today claim that they can handle the digital part of any organization. Many startups do not have any clue about their Digital Journey and they end up trusting fake agencies, wasting their time, energy and money of course. They have nothing or very less understanding of the technical jargons that agencies make them fall prey for. It would be unfair to say that agencies don’t take the clients for granted often, and give them false promises, bigger dreams, and then they are all set to take clients for a ride.
So let’s take a closer look at this article about the major KPIs for digital marketing for startup founders:
Digital marketing has 3 major pillars, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media and Google AdWords. So starting with KPIs for SEO, let’s see what are the important parameters involved,
KPIs for SEO
Before starting any work on SEO, the foremost thing any Digital marketer should do is SEO Audit. The audit is important to understand a lot of parameters. The audit also includes Competition research. There are different parameters in Audit, the audit checklist which we call it. We will discuss few important parameters of Audit checklist here.
- Keyword Research: First step is to identify keywords that your site can realistically target. You need to have the brand authority or budget to compete with your rivals so that the possibility of ranking your keyword is high. Or else, it’s practically difficult for any small or medium business to compete.
- Identifying Competition and Analysis: Once you have done your Keyword listing, Google will show you the sites that appear in the Top 10 list of those keywords. You’ll see same sites appear again and again. You will want to identify sites that rank for many keywords in that niche and add them to your list of competitors.
- Analyze your competitors: Once you have shortlisted your competition, deep dive in their profile and understand their metrics of the business. Link Research Tools has a great tool named “Juice Tool’ which can be used to get the general metrics for each of your competition, like, domain Authority, Inbound Links, Social shares, Domain age, etc. Though these numbers and stats are not enough, but you can have a fair idea of their metrics.
- Quality and Quantity of Backlinks: You can sort the Domain rank using Ahrefs, to view their backlinks from the most to least authoritative. This will give you an idea of how quality links you’ll have to target. You can also estimate the traffic increase based on keyword positioning and efforts to boost good backlinks to a certain website.
- Website Speed: A poor performing website results in a poor user experience, and sites with poor experiences face the brunt of less promotion in search results.
- Crawling, Indexing& Ranking: If search engines don’t crawl your website efficiently, you’re unlikely to rank. Even social shares and links won’t solve your accessibility issues and the impact will be, your link building will look ineffective. And you surely don’t want to cripple yourself even before you have started.
- Indexing – Once you’re sure and happy that search engines are crawling your website correctly, shift focus on how your pages are being indexed and actively monitored for problems.
- Ranking – Now the final leg of your work is to see that are your pages getting ranked as you want them to. Make sure you work to get your pages higher rankings than they already are.
- On-Page Optimization: On Page Analysis is useful for identifying optimization opportunities and the domain level analysis helps define the level of effort necessary to make site-wide corrections.
- Site Level Optimization: Site level analysis is also important to understand the functioning of your site is proper or no and to rectify the corrections on time to optimize the site. Some of these activities include URL optimization, content optimization, Http markup, etc.
- Off Page Audit: Off-page refers to all the activities that you do away from your website to raise the ranking of your page in search engines.Off-page is not just about links. Brand mentions (your site URL or brand mentioned on another site without a hyperlink) are an integral part of off-page search signals.
These above mentioned are the key integral factors to conduct an SEO audit. Once our SEO audit is done, you understand where do you stand and now it’s time to set targets for SEO: There are few factors which we need to keep in mind for setting KPI’s in SEO. Some are listed below:
- Keyword Ranking: This plays a major role in SEO. Rank is an approximation of your website’s position for a particular search term in a search engine’s result pages. The lower the rank, the easier your website is to find in search results for that keyword.It can also be useful to identify areas/regions where your website doesn’t rank well enough so that further improvements in SEO can be done.
- Organic Traffic: Organic traffic is what one should strive to improve. This traffic is defined as visitors coming from a search engine, such as Google or Bing.
- Organic Conversions: Driving traffic to your website and landing pages isn’t enough to survive; you need to convert those visitors into customers. In electronic commerce, conversion marketing is the act of converting site visitors into paying customers.
- Backlinks: Your site’s quality is largely determined by the quality of sites linking to it. Thus, it is extremely important to analyze the backlink profile of your site and look for opportunities to improve.
- User Experience Signals: Enriching user experience should be your first priority. There are few points which you need to focus on to enhance this experience for a user.
- Bounce Rate: Bounce rate helps us to understand how the website content is perceived by people/visitors. On other hands, bounce rates on keyword level tell a lot about the quality and performance of the keyword analysis phase in SEO. This helps to focus on right keywords.
- Average session duration: Similar to bounce rate, duration or length of visit to your website are good quality benchmarks of the organic traffic channel. More the average session duration, more are the chances of user engagement to your website.
- Click Through Rate (CTR): CTR is the ratio of users who click on a specific link to the number of total users who view a page, email, or advertisement. It is commonly used to measure the success of an online advertising campaign for a particular website as well as the effectiveness of email campaigns.
SEO plays the major role when it comes to basic KPIs. But SEO is one part of it. There are other verticals which should be taken into consideration by startups to improve their digital experience and they have their own KPIs as well. Social media and Adwords two verticals which also should be considered, as these can be the growth factors for your startup.
KPI’s are the horses that pull your Business cart Online. One such medium used widely today is Social Media.
Social media can help you grow your brand. Today, not having an active social media platform for your business is like not taking the fastest metro to get to your destination.
Entrepreneurs who believe that social is a must but are not aware of how they can leverage this platform to boost their business, we share with you some important KPI’s which help you to monitor& track your performance.
We take you one step at a time in understanding what exactly to do with Social.
Audit your Social Media Presence
What is existing platforms my business available on? Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Snapchat. Inspect the No. of followers fans, No. of Posts, Blogs videos etc. Map this record weekly to study your progress.
INTERNAL KPIs- Measure the quality & quantity of the content you are generating for your social handles per week. This includes the number of social media posts, blogs, videos etc.
As this is the first interaction of your Audience to your brand on social media it is very important to have a well-defined & researched content strategy.
REACH- You have drafted a beautiful content, but do we have an audience to showcase it to? It’s very important that your strategy is in line with the target Audience.
Monitor the No. of Audience (Fans & Followers), No. of Mentions, No. of Youtube Channel Subscribers.
SOCIAL ENGAGEMENT-The first thing a start-up may need is Brand Awareness. As opposed to established brands, entrepreneurs should invest their efforts in setting a brand identity & image for their business. How engaged are you able to keep your audience speaks volume about the success of your campaign & also gives you insights into areas which need improvement. Check for Retweets, Social Shares, Comments, Active Groups, Social traffic, No. of Social Influencers, Video Views.
Return on Investment- We have invested our valuable time, energy & money into developing a strategy for our Social Media Marketing. What is the outcome of it & how can we see tangible results for it?
Firstly, We track the Sales revenue generated after running a campaign.
Secondly, Closely Monitor Conversions because this will help you to form a planned & informed budget for social media. You can put a monetary value so that you can measure your ROI.
Conversions need not always be sales they are a positive action taken by a visitor to your website through social media. This may include newsletter signups, content downloads, webinar registrations.
Third & most important improve your customer service by resolving their issues. This is predominantly been seen on Twitter, where Railway Minister Suresh Prabhu efficiently addresses the queries & troubles of Citizens.
KPI for Adwords
Google Adwords is a Marketing tool through which you can get your message to the target Audience. It helps to measure the performance of your Ads.
Let us get familiar with some important KPIs which add value to your target of achieving your goals.
- Impressions – Every time your ad displays, it’s called an “impression.’’ This KPI indicates how many people have actually seen your Ad When you run a campaign we want it to reach to a maximum number of Audience.
- Clicks-Clicks are the number of times someone clicks on your Ad Copy. Technically, a click is counted even if that person never actually reaches your Destination landing page. You can measure your Clicks for a Campaign, Ad Group or Ad.
- Click-through rate- The percentage of people who click your ads to go to your site is called the “click-through rate” (CTR). These are the people that your ad engaged, and a high CTR is an indication of how appealing your ad is to your audience. Check with your Digital Marketing agency on how well the CTR is performing. A low CTR indicates your Ad or campaign lacks engaging content.
- Cost per conversion – Cost per conversion shows you the average amount of money you spend on PPC for every conversion that you earn.
- Conversion rate – The no. of people that landed on your website & completed your objective. Make sure to have a user-friendly approach on your website which leads the user in contributing to a conversion. A tip we would suggest is that do not make lengthy form fill ups.
- Total Spend – This is the cumulative total of the amount spent on your ads.
KPI’s will vary & every audience will react differently on different platforms. So focus on KPI’s which are driving your business & operate a profitable campaign for your startup business.