Introduction to Strategy & Planning: Key Performance Indicator (KPI) Glossary
This is a summary of some of the KPIs you should be familiar with as a supplement to S1E2 of our strategy and planning guide.
The article this relates to can be found here:
S1E2: Introduction to Strategy & Planning: Is the Objective Clear?
Consideration and Conversion KPIs
- Traffic - triggered by a request to (a proxy for people) open a website destination. There are various ways to measure this from ‘sessions’ that record browser instances, to ‘unique visitors’ that require cookies etc.
- Dwell time - how long a browser is left open on a page, not an exact science but used as a proxy for whether people are engaging with content. If you have an article like this one, you might want to see if people take the time to read it.
- Bounce Rate - browsers (people proxy) who arrive at a page, and then quickly leave. This is often seen as one to improve by reducing its value; by encouraging people to explore other pages on your website, or investing time in the content.
- Downloads - has something been downloaded
- Transactions - has a defined transaction happened - for example did someone click a ‘buy now’, or did a but now successfully complete purchase etc
- Registrations - successful data collection
- CPC; Cost per Click - the cost of a campaign divided by the number of conversions. This can end up being a basic form of ROI if a business is paying attention to its ‘break-even numbers’. For example, there may well be a response rate of only 100 people from 1,000 emails, but if they are high-value responses then this could be a great result.
Awareness KPIs
- Visibility/Viewability - how viewable an ad is (eg is it likely to have been seen on a webpage).
- Impressions - Number of times an ad is served
- CPC; Cost Per Click - total media spend divided by the number of clicks, this is another consideration metric, but can be a proxy for how well an individual execution or media placement is working compared to others that have a CTA (Call To Action).
- CTR; Click Through Rate - is another consideration metric, not an awareness one. Where possible steer clients away from this as a measure of success in awareness campaigns unless there is a clear CTA and customer journey.
- CPM; Cost per Mille - the price of media based on buying one thousand 1,000 placements (mille in French, not Million in English!)
- ROAS; Return on Advertising Spend - just looked at through the lens of the cost of the media buy rather than the cost of the campaign (including for example creative production)
- ROI; Return on Investment - generally includes the creative and production costs of the campaign, to reflect a ‘real world return’ on dollars spent by a business
- SOV; Share of Voice - can be a useful measure, for example, by tracking share of search around particular keywords
The article this relates to can be found here:
S1E2: Introduction to Strategy & Planning: Is the Objective Clear?