5 Essential KPI to Track in Your Business

If you’re consciously & consistently marketing your business + offers, you’ll eventually want to know where you’re being the most efficient in your efforts. Which social platform best grows your email list? Is your sales page converting to the industry’s standard? Where in your email nurture sequence do you have leaks & how can you fix them?

The answers to these questions (& more) reside in your KPIs – your key performance indicators.

“A key performance indicator (KPI) evaluates the success of an organization or of a particular activity (such as projects, programs, products and other initiatives) in which it engages. KPIs provide a focus for strategic + operational improvement, create an analytical basis for decision making & help focus attention on what matters most.”

— Wikipedia, Performance indicator

Not all metrics are created equal, i.e. not all are key to your business’ success. The whole point of gathering + analyzing data is to gain insights & inform our marketing activities so that we can improve our results & optimize our time, energy & investment (in the case of paid advertising or delegation to team members).

Here are the 5 KPIs that’ll give you the most information about your marketing efforts.

1. Social media engagement

Are people liking, commenting & sharing the free content you create on social media? This will help you reach more people, appear more often in their feeds & eventually help you convert them to an email subscriber or customer. Organic reach is free & perceived as more trustworthy than paid advertising, especially if your content was shared or directly sent to a friend.

Meta Insights (Reports & Content) & Google Analytics (Traffic acquisition) will give you very detailed numbers about these metrics.

2. Ads performance

If you pay for ads, you’re probably already looking at your cost per click (CPC), cost per 1,000 impressions (CPM) &/or unique link click through rates (CTR). But then, how are these people doing in the rest of your funnel? Are they opening your emails & purchasing from you? You need to make sure that you’re targeting the right audience – those who need your offer & are willing to pay for it!

Ads Manager will provide you with the info about the ads part of your funnel but you need to track these individuals at the contact level for you to see the whole picture.

3. Website traffic

Do you have a steady stream of traffic to your website? Which pages are your most viewed? You could feature your most popular posts or podcast episodes on your homepage, or tweak your opt-in landing page’s copy to increase your conversions.

Google Analytics (Pages & screens) will give you all the deets about your (anonymized) visitors’ behaviors + preferences.

4. Email open rates

Whether it’s an email newsletter or a nurture sequence, your #1 email KPI is your open rate. Some inboxes will directly send your emails to your contacts’ spam folder if your average open rate (aka reputation) is below 20%. Therefore, it’s really important to keep an eye on this & improve your copywriting if you’re below that benchmark.

Email service providers (Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign, etc.) will all give you that information.

5. Sales

How much sales are you making? Paired with your website traffic & your email open + click rates, you’ll get powerful intel about your customer’s journey.

Websites, payment processors (Stripe, PayPal, Square, etc.) & Google Analytics (Ecommerce purchases) will tell you what & how much you sold.

The key is to track our KPIs consistently & make this process as easy as possible.

It’s not an especially rewarding habit to adopt 😉 so here’s how I make it happen in my business:

1. I schedule this task in my calendar, at 9am every Monday. I always feel better once I’ve checked it off!

2. I minimize the manual work – I download reports from Meta Insights & Google Analytics, which I then copy + paste into my database.

3. I use conditional formatting to see at a glance how I compare to industry benchmarks.

4. I create reports with linked charts to my database, which I refresh with a single click.

Hopefully, this will help you embrace the habit of recording your KPIs – if you hire it out, it’ll be even easier!

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Now I want to know:

Do you track your KPIs? Which ones are you focusing on improving right now?
Let me know in the comments below!

Marie xo