KPIs for your Digital Marketing Team members

Below is a list of some of the KPIs for the team members of  PPC, please note that this list is not comprehensive and is just for reference.

How do we measure the success? All the KPIs will have a numeric value attached to it and will be conveyed to each team member.  As we move, the progress will be measured against the pre-agreed KPIs

KPIs- Paid Marketing- PPC team

v  Cost per conversion/acquisition

v  Revenue on Ad spend

v  Advertising to sales/leads

v  Click through rate

v  Total Leads generated and Cost per lead

v  Cost income ratio

v  Conversion rate

v  Cost per click and eCPC

v  Quality score- This will lead to Higher Ad positions, Lower CPC, Higher impression share and Lower CPA

v  Total Goal completions

v  Lifetime value of a customer

v  Allocated budget vs Total Spend (keeping ROAS in mind)

v  KPIs for each step in the funnel- For example: visitor to lead, MQL to SQL, visitor to customer etc.

v  Overall website traffic increase- branded vs non-branded keywords

KPIs- SEO team

v  Rank for main converting keywords

v  Rank for secondary keywords

v  Increase in organic traffic and overall traffic volume after the start of SEO activity

v  Increase in number of pages on the site that generate traffic

v  % increase in organic conversions

v  Increase in non-branded keywords

v  Organic Impressions

v  Organic Click through rate

v  Link building KPIs- total links created, number of links from the authority sites, number of link from extremely relevant sites, Inbound links created for a anchor text resulting in Google indexing

v  % increase in referral traffic, referral conversions

v  % increase in brand search traffic and brand mentions

v  % increase in sign-ups, newsletter subscription etc.

v  Goal completions

v  Revenue generated and total number of transactions/booking etc.

v  Page-views, Avg. time on site, pages/session, Bounce rate, unique website visitors

v  Revenue per search visit

KPIs- Social Media Team

v  Link clicks, reach, inbound links generated, blog subscribers, video views

v  Shares , share of voice , net promoter , sentiment,  # of social influencers and comments

v  Time on site, email sign ups, referral traffic, unique visitors, page-views, reviews etc.

v  Brand mentions, community growth, drop off rate

v  Profile visits, post reach, potential reach

v  Active followers /People Talking about

v  Followers/fans, conversions, issue resolved

v  Impressions- How many times the post showed in the news feed

v  Traffic coming from Social Media

v  Leads generated/Action taken on the website, cost per lead, lead conversion rate, LTV

v  Goal completions

v  Retweets, @connects, brand mentions

v  Sales and Average order value/ticket size

v  Revenue generated and Revenue on Ad spend

v  Customer service- Response time, Avg. handling time, First contact resolution, No of questions answered

KPIs- Email Marketing team

v  Delivery rates

v  Open rates

v  Bounce rates

v  Conversion rate and total conversions

v  CTR

v  Unsubscribe rate

v  Spam compliance rate

v  Site traffic

v  Time on site/app

v  List growth

v  Total sales

v  Social growth

Note- KPIs for other teams like Front end coder, design team etc. will be discussed  later on as this depends on the projects at hand and other factors.

Sample KPI for Design UX team :  Quantitative UX KPIs :(1)Task success rate (2) Time on task (3) Use of search vs. navigation (4)User error rate (5)System Usability Scale (SUS) Qualitative KPIs (1) Reported expectations and performance (2)Overall satisfaction

Affiliate Marketing- Factors to consider before approving affiliates and some KPIs

Things to consider before approving an affiliate

·          Appropriate category- check the category in which the website is. It should not be violence, porn etc.

·          Implement a payout threshold- I Ex:-f you make it $1,000, this means to get a payout, an affiliate should earn $1,000 as commission and not generate $1,000 revenue Affiliate should agree to this.

·          As a good practice, payouts should happen after 45-60 days from the date of sale. This will avoid the affiliate fraud if any. Affiliate should agree to this.

·          Avoid auto approval, approve each affiliate manually after scrutiny

·          Get a proper affiliate management software/tool in place before you start your program- like GetCAKE

·          Website stats- monthly hits, unique visitors, site traffic quality, update frequency, relevancy, website optimized for mobile, check the company records, social reputation and other factors

·          What payout model the affiliates prefer and match it with yours, if it is not a fit there will be issues in future. Check things like cookie window, refunds, attribution modeling , tracking and make sure you both mutually agree on what a definition of sale is

·          Super-affiliates- Make sure you have best of the rewards, incentives and commissions for super affiliates. It should be different from the normal affiliates or else super-affiliates will not be interested

·          Check for invalid URLs and invalid websites

·          Banner overload- make sure that the affiliates does not do that, otherwise it will spoil your brand image

·          Search the affiliates URL on Whois.net. Make sure the email address from the sign-up process is a business email and consistent with the registration information from the Whois search.

·          Approval rate- Low approval rate means low quality traffic, do not pay and if problems exists, disapprove the affiliate

·          Refund rate- If refund rate from a particular affiliate is too high, monitor it. It might happen that the affiliate has run the wrong advertising, do not pay and if problems exists, disapprove the affiliate

·          Chargeback rate- This should not be high, if this is high means something is fraudulent. Do not pay and if problems exists, disapprove the affiliate

·          If an affiliate is asking for very low rates, check the website and do the due diligence.

·          Set the following terms and conditions and make sure affiliate agrees to it and sign the paperwork before you initiate- commission, non-commissionable transactions, level based commissions, product based commissions , payouts rates and duration, payment frequency, timings, minimum payment, one time vs recurring commissions differentiation and other key factors

KPIs for Affiliate marketing- [per affiliate]

o    ROAS

o    Average Order value

o    Total transactions

o    New vs returning customers

o    Revenue growth

o    Customer base growth

o    % of sales coming from that particular affiliate

o    EPC- average earnings per one hundred clicks sent by affiliates to the merchant’s website

o    Conversion ratio

o    Reversal rate- % of transactions that affiliates refer to an advertiser get canceled/voided, and hence the commission gets reversed

o    Sales volumes/orders

o    Network KPIs- recruited affiliates, active affiliates, power ranking

o    Cost per sale

o    Average earnings per click

o    Customer Lifetime value

o    Cost per acquisition

6 Key areas to focus - Basic SEO Audit for your website

1.    Accessibility- It is important because if your website is not accessed by the crawlers, it implies that it does not exist, no matter how beautiful your website is. So below are the factors you should keep in mind while doing an audit

·         Robots.txt file- It is used to block certain pages from getting indexed into search engine. You should be careful on which pages you want to hide and manually check the robots.txt file, and make sure it's not restricting access to important sections of your site.

·         HTTP status codes- check all the 301,302, 404 and 501,502 errors and pages

·         XML sitemap- It should be well documented and should follow the sitemap protocol. Make sure it is submitted to the webmaster tools/search engine console. All the pages on the website should be included in this

·         Site architecture- Overall navigation should be easy and visible to the users strategically. Sit should follow 3 click rule. Focus on both the vertical and horizontal linking opportunities

·         Navigation- Avoid flash and javascript navigation

·         Site performance- Use tools like Google page speed, YSlow, Pingdom full page test

2.    Indexability- It is important because now we want to see how many pages of our website are actually indexed.

·         How many pages are indexed- use site.website.com and see the results

·         Page searches: Use http://www.example.com

·         Brand searches- Just type your company name, if you are visible its good. If not, your site has been penalized and its time to dig deep and sort this issue.

3.    On page ranking factors-This is very important as the changes you make to your website pages will help you getting indexed on SERP

·         URL- should be short and user friendly (less than 115 characters), include relevant keywords, should use subfolders and not subdomain, try using static URLs, make sure you are using hyphens and not underscores

·         Content- each page should ideally contain minimum 300 words and should create value for the audience who consumes that content. It should contain the keywords and ideally it should be front loaded. Make sure it is not spammy, keyword loaded etc. Max keywords in 500 words content should not exceed 5 keywords. No grammatical errors or spelling mistakes and should be easily readable and also search engines should be easily able to find it and read it. Focus on how your information architecture is, make sure there is no keyword cannibalism i.e. multiple pages are targeted for the same keywords (in this case merge the pages if possible). Avoid duplicate content

·         HTML markup- Use W3C validator to check your site’s HTML code

·         Page titles- 70 characters title, should describe what the page is all about, should contain a keyword which should be front loaded, should not be over optimized

·         Meta Descriptions-No more than 155 characters, every page should have a unique meta description

·         Head tags- Avoid meta keywords in all the pages, use rel=”canonical” for duplicate content, use ‘rel’ syntax if pagination is used

·         Images- should contain Alt texts and Image file name

·         Outlinks- should be directed to trustworthy sites, relevant to page’s content, should make use of anchor texts, should not be broken, avoid unnecessary redirection, make sure if you are outlinking it should not be ‘nofollow’

·         Other <body> tags- Use H1, H2 and H3 tags if applicable to structure your content. Avoid iframes, appropriate content to ads ratio on the page should be there.

4.    Off Page ranking factors- This is another part which is very important as this focuses on external factors which helps your website to get ranked

·         Popularity- how popular is your website (check Alexa), check site traffic through analytics, use compete and comscore how you perform against your competitors, check for the total backlinks you are receiving at the moment

·         Trust- To check your site for malware, you can rely on blacklists such as DNS-BH or Google's Safe Browsing API. Avoid keyword stuffing, hidden texts, cloaking (i.e., showing the search engines one thing while showing users something else).

·         Backlinks- number of unique root domains linking to the website, number of nofollows backlinks (should be very less), anchor text distribution should seem natural, topically relevant backlinks, the backlinks from the domain should be from a site which is popular, trustworthy and authoritative

·         Authority- Check for Domain authority and Page authority

·         Social engagement- how many likes/retweets/+1s/etc. are each of your site's pages receiving; you want mentions from reputable and highly influential people.

5.    Competitive Analysis: It is important because you want to see how well(or poor) you are performing with respect to your competitors

6.    Strategies- Content strategy, Keyword strategy, link-building strategy, Blogging strategy, KPIs setting, Analytics strategy and resources allocation. These are very critical and should be documented in a separate document.

Things to consider before you select your Mobile Attribution Partner

Today, I will talk about some of the major things that you should know before you select your Mobile attribution partner. If you are not aware of the basics of what the attribution is, please feel free to read the Mobile attribution guide -Part 1- Part 6 (just select Nov 2016 on the right hand side > and you will find it)

So what are the key things you should consider, below are my thoughts.


1. Company, Technology and Innovation

• Look at the technology they are using- is it a technology built for Mobile (simply Mobile first)? If not, don't go ahead. Web analytics and tracking is very different from Mobile analytics and tracking
• List of integrated partners
• Clients list and testimonials
• Average years in the industry
• Are they updating their product regularly as per the industry demand and overall landscape/ecosystem
• Multi-platform support? Can they track smart watch as well- for instance?
• Do they have a dedicated R&D team- do they innovate?
• What is the downtime?
• It should be unbiased- should not own any Ad network to avoid any conflicts of interest
• Who is the Attribution authority and any other certifications they have- data, security, fraud prevention etc
• How they are handling the data and how secured it is?
• Do they offer full funnel approach or only click based attribution. This is very important if you are running Display campaigns as you cannot ignore Impressions based attribution
• Customizable attribution window?
• How is their integrations with 3rd party providers- for instance DMPs or DSPs
• What is the cost structure? How much are they charging per session/event?
• Do they offer configurable attribution?
• How do they validate the purchase or in APP events?
• Segmentation- how far can you segment
• Should allow unlimited data exporting options and also it should send data wherever needed- network, S2S, 3rd party vendor, CRM etc
• Marketing team should be able to do it without needing any help from Technical team- so choose a partner accordingly

(2) Network Integrations 

• How many networks are currently integrated with them? Minimum of 500 networks integrated is preferred, anything below that- dump it
• What is the lead time?
• How long it takes for the integration?
• Current documentation available- network assistance?
• How fast do they integrate a network who is new or not already integrated with them?
• What data can Ad network receives? Callbacks details etc
• Charges - callbacks, postbacks etc- ideally they should not charge
• Data latency- How long it is takingthe data to reach and what is the overall latency?

(3) Customer service , client training, webinars, education offerings etc

• What is the turnaround time?
• Do they have a local support? Lets say you are based out of Dubai and the Attribution partner is in North America- do they offer support based on your time zone?
• Are they offering support if needed by you or your new/existing partner?
• Are they educating you on the new features or essential like frauds and how to prevent it?
• Do you have a dedicated account manager?
• Do they offer weekly/fortnightly support?
• Do they offer guides, technical documentation , help. FAQs online or through an online community?
• Do they offer product training- beginners, intermediate, advanced and ad-hoc?

(4) Universal SDK

• Should be lightweight
• Has to be open-source to maintain transparency 
• Should not occupy too much of space on your app
• Should be Flexible enough
• Should be network agnostic
• You only need to install SDK once- its finished for ever , no more SDK needed

(5) Dashboard

• Is it user friendly?
• Easy to use, sleek, sophisticated?
• Report generation- easy and friendly?
• Visually appealing? graphs, line charts and other options?
• Easy to download and share reports?
• How quick it is to set up a tracker for a new network?
• Data digging- do you find it comprehensive and can reach upto the last layer- for example the creatives and adgroups apart from networks and campaigns
• Unlimited reporting available?
• Can you see real time data?
• Features like cohort analysis, LTV, engagements, events data etc. should be easily available
• Can you access it on different screens with ease? Is there any app available?
• Do they offer recommendations and any actionable insights?
• Can you get your data from the time you started the contract? Many a times at the most you can get 90 days data. Remember, the data is yours and its your rights to get the data whenever you need it?
• Do they offer an API?
• Is the dashboard customizable?

(6) Responsive to the market needs and features?

• Do they offer features like deeplinking, social media tracking, TV attribution, cohort analysis, Rich in-app events tracking
• Scale- How many billion events are they tracking currently? Are they ready to scale up as your company scales up?
• Do they offer key/critical Features like- data driven marketing, real time intelligence, fraud prevention, store stats, app analytics, multi platform support
• Support Re-targeting and Re-engagement campaigns?
• Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and other major Ad networks? Are the already a  preferred partner?
• How good are they in capturing the industry information and sharing it with the clients to educate them
• Offer multi-channel attribution? Customizable event tracking?

Note- This is an ongoing list, I will keep on updating this as and when needed.