Innovative Approach

Key performance indicators is terms which is now very common but not yet understood. There are lot of definitions and how to apply this in your business by various intellectuals but it needs to be followed from the ground level.

Lets back to the definition of KPI as per Wikipedia which says “measurement or a metrics use to define the organization’s success and goals”. So a KPI can be anything in business, suppose if you are running a retail chain then your marketing guys are your KPI’s who are bringing in more affiliates which is ultimately helping in growing your business across shores.

A very simple case study, we all know Mac Donalds (a fast food restaurant with chain across the globle), so what is the KPI for its success

-Its their marketing and sales force
-Its their food
-Its their low cost
-Its their customer support

Guess?

Now my friends it none of the above, I agree that they have good and cost effective food but they are none of their KPIs, the KPI here is the “Brand” which people acknoldges blindly and wherever they are in America, Europe or Asia they rush just seeing the Mac Donald’s signage.

So branding is one of the key performance indicator here besides other stuff though they are also a part of KPI but doesnot hold lots of importance as we will definitely consume the burger at Mac Donalds even if its not good (Guys its always good though as my personal experience)

So novices might now be having some idea about KPI as I am moving to the aim of my post which is dedicated to KPI for web marketing.

Internet marketing here there and everywhere, every web entrepreneurs wants their websites to generate sales but in real life they even donot care what sorts of theme is running on their website. There are evidences that a handicraft supplier is displaying just photograph and not the factual description of the product so how can he/she desire sales.

So we need to define our KPI’s as a proactive steps in internet marketing of our websites.

Web constitutes of Webpages which is again a blend of content, images or some videos etc. So if we are marketing our website we need to consider each and everything about our webpages but this is not whole story, I am explaining the KPI for web but not pushing into marketing. So here is the final picture

Whenever I am launching a campaign suppose SEO I will say :

• Content
• Website structure
• Keywords
• Backlinks

Are my KPI’s and again if we dig more I will say my website landing pages are KPI’s.

In a nutshell we can define all these factors whether its related to SEO or conversions as KPI’s but we will come to know after experimenting what are our exact KPI.

In SEO I am targeting 100 keywords and I am ranked with 30 of them in top 10 but only 7 of them yields me visitors and rest do nothing and again from these 7 I have 2 keywords from which I got the lead. Hence I can say that these 2 keywords are my KPIs and I need to invest more in these (may be retaining or ranking more higher positions) and stop investing in other keywords which are doing almost nothing. So I got my KPI automatically during my campaign though I defined my KPI’s for all 100 keywords, such a big different.

Once again I dig into my site overlay (from Google Analytics) and found that maximum conversions have taken place from a page www.xyz.com/file3.html i.e. the user has triggered the call to action from this page, for example they landing to my contact form from this particular page. Hence again this webpage (file3.html becomes my KPI) and I try to enhance it more and work over some more business intelligence the root cause of this KPI.

So KPI are always there even if you donot define them in your initial stages they will come automatically. I have seen my clients running adwords for thousands of dollars with ZERO conversions, they have bided higher but the quality score is low. Reason “Poor Ad copy”, so here it’s the Adcopy. I simple created one more ad variations with dynamic keywords and we were able to get clicks and the quality score was triggered.

Now we have a web analytics world which is considered as an integral part of Internet Marketing. Big portals employ a separate web analytic who can define, evaluate and monitor their KPIs just by mining the backlog data via tools like GA, Omniture, Indextools. Traditional SEO could do a lot of ranking and traffic but they could rarely mine in web analytics and put a picture as what’s happening on their sites.

So if you are running any websites just mine up your analytic tool today and find what are the pages, keywords, search engines, referrals etc. giving you the maximum benefits in terms of sales and then you could benchmark your KPI’s within those and work further to enhance your business just by removing the items which are performing poor. In the marketing world its all about find the bad one replace with other if the other goes well then its good otherwise continue the process. But as all experimenting cannot be done throughout the business cycle so we must define our short and long terms goals and then launch the campaigns accordingly.

KPI – Key Performance Indicators will be governing the web sooner or later, its here to see which business intelligence tool will come up to win the market as currently there are only handful of them with limitations.