By Chelsea McClain
“But Moneyball is about baseball,” you say? Yes, but it is also a highly regarded business book that teaches the importance of DATA, DATA, DATA. Without data you are going on gut instinct…which is a very risky way to do business.
The book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis, is about how data, and the shrewd analysis of said data, trumped money in the game of baseball, making winners out of one of the poorest teams in the league. But the lessons learned from how Billy Beane ran the Oakland A’s can be applied to the business world. The big takeaway is how essential your data, and specifically data analysis, is to your business. You must back up your decisions with data, not your gut.
So, my “game” is marketing. And in marketing, you will often hear complaints about how difficult it is to calculate an ROI for marketing efforts. I beg to differ. In the digital age of marketing, there are plenty of metrics to be had. If you can’t calculate an ROI for your marketing campaigns, then maybe you aren’t asking the right questions.
First, what’s the difference between a KPI (key performance indicator) and a metric? A metric measures overall business health, while KPIs measure progress toward a specific goal. So, a metric, tied to a specific business objective, is a KPI. What might be a metric to me could be a KPI to you.
With that out of the way, here is a list of marketing KPIs/metrics that are commonly used by association management companies (AMCs). Choose those that will best measure your progress toward your company’s goals and voila! Your ROI awaits.
We would love to know what are your favorite KPIs/metrics for association management marketing? Leave them in the comments below.
Blog program
- Blog visits
- Traffic source breakdown
- Blog homepage visits
- Number of posts published
- Top viewed posts
- Average views per post
- Average inbound links per post
- Average comments per post
- Social shares per post
- Number of clicks to another internal page
- Internal click source breakdown
- Top click generating posts (topics)
- Topical relevancy
- Authorship stats
LinkedIn Article
- Followers’ demographics
- Number of followers
- Engagement rate (what kind of content engages most?)
- Post views and engagements
- Viewer information
eBook
- Unique visits
- Time on page (advertising the eBook)
- Downloads
- Emails collected (stats)
- Shares
- Inbound links
Video
- Likes
- Bounce rates
- View-through rates
- Social media shares
- Returning users
- Unique users
- CTA (call to action) clicks
Email Campaign
- Number of emails delivered
- Number of opens
- Click-through rate
- Click-to-open rate
- Unsubscribe rate
- Bounce rate (hard and soft)
- Social shares
- Forwards
- Data leveraging to establish target demographics
- Growth of target demographics through personalized content
Social Media
- Follower count
- Impressions/views (total number of times users saw the post)
- Post reach (total number of unique accounts that have seen the post)
- Share of voice (SOV) – (how much online visibility you have compared to your competitors – Decide on keywords, hashtags or categories that you want to focus on.)
- Clicks
- Likes
- Shares
- Comments
- Mentions
- Profile visits
TikTok
- Video views
- Profile views
- Likes, comments, and shares per video
- Average watch time
- Trending videos
Website / Landing page
- Bounce rate
- Unique visitors
- Pages viewed per session
- Average time on page
- Traffic by source
- Top landing pages
- Top exit pages
- Content refresh (frequency and number of pages refreshed)
- Join form activity
Surveys & Polls
- Unique visits
- Number of completed
- Bounce rate
- Traffic by source
A/B Testing
- Testing velocity (the measure of how many tests you are performing over a certain time period)
- Testing win rate
Brand Kit Development
- Sentiment (what do people know and feel about your brand?)
- Social mentions
- Top-of-mind brand recall
- Share of voice – is the percentage of coverage and conversations about your brand, relative to your competitors. In other words, how often your brand is mentioned on the internet compared to other brands.
- Share of impressions – is the percentage of times your ads were shown out of the total impressions they could have received based on your targeting – a number you can find in Google Analytics.
Press Release
- Click-throughs
- Conversions
- Reads
- Number of Yahoo and Google alerts
- Social media mentions
- Potential reach
- Engagement
- Media coverage
SEO
- Keyword rankings
- Organic traffic (from a SERP)
- Referral traffic
- Backlinks (how many and from where)
- Bounce rate
- High impression / low click pages
- Page load speed