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Setting clear digital marketing objectives and KPIs is essential for measuring the success of your campaigns. Whether you’re aiming to increase brand awareness, drive website traffic, or generate qualified leads, defining measurable goals ensures you stay on track. In this guide, we’ll walk through how to align your marketing goals with SMART KPIs, supported by real-world examples and actionable frameworks.
To implement digital marketing strategies successfully, businesses must start with a digital marketing objective and key performance indicators (KPIs) from the outset. With the formulation of business and marketing goals, companies will then be able to determine if they are headed in the right direction.
Digital Marketing Objectives define what you aim to achieve with your campaigns, such as increasing brand visibility, lead generation, or sales growth.
KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) are measurable values that track progress toward those goals, often framed as SMART goals—Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound.
Metrics are data points that support your KPIs, such as website traffic, bounce rate, and email open rates.
One way to evaluate the relevance of a performance indicator is to use the SMART criteria. SMART is an acronym that stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound.
Goal setting has to be specific to ensure that it is easy to communicate and comprehend during team discussions.
Having a measurable goal allows you to review whether that goal has been reached.
It is crucial to set a reasonable and realistic target in order not to get demoralised when you fail to achieve it.
To have an impact on the overall performance of an organisation, your goal should align with your business objectives.
Goal setting has to be time-constrained to instill a sense of urgency and motivation to achieve the goal.
Metrics are values used by marketers to measure and track the performance of their campaigns. However, it is important to differentiate them from vanity metrics.
Vanity metrics are measurable data that look great on paper but do not necessarily make an impact when it comes to fulfilling the campaign objectives. Some examples of metrics include:
A diagram depicting the 4 different types of Marketing Objectives
Referring to the diagram above, marketing objectives can be categorised into the 4 types: Awareness, Interests, Leads, and Sales.
Building awareness for a brand requires consistent marketing. Customers are more likely to purchase from brands they are more familiar with. Establishing brand awareness is valuable when promoting a company’s products, especially in the early stages of a business.
A good example is Tim Hortons’ awareness campaign to promote its Dark Roast. This involved driving around the city of Toronto and offering Canadians a place to cosy up with a warm drink in the winter. During the bus ride, people were able to sip on their cups of coffee, relax, and give testimonials on the new dark coffee drink.
It is important to produce content that appeals to your website visitors if you want them to spend a longer time and stay engaged. The more relevant, interesting, and beneficial your content is, the more interest your website visitors will show.
There are various ways website visitors show their interest, such as signing up for an account, registering for a free email newsletter, or finding the address of the store location.
Leads can be viewed as the stage before the completion or transaction of the sale. However, the type of leads may vary for different companies and industries.
For a restaurant, the leads could be reservations made online or through phone booking, while for an interior designer, the leads obtained could be through contact form enquiries.
Businesses with an e-commerce platform can define online purchases as a sales objective. Sales are the proceeds a company generates from selling products and services. It contributes directly to the revenue of the business.
With the type of objectives defined, a business then needs to align the goals with the relevant KPIs.
To measure business performance more effectively, the marketing team needs to ensure that the marketing objectives of the company have to be aligned with relevant KPIs and the right metrics. This is an effective way to gauge the health of a business by accurately and efficiently managing the agreed-upon targets and goals.
A negative example of this would be setting social media post likes as KPIs for a sales objective, since the number of likes does not have a direct correlation to the revenue generated.
A diagram depicting the relationship of Objectives, KPIs, and Metrics
Referring to the diagram above, the marketing objective can be seen as setting a clear course for the team members of the company to follow.
KPI is an alignment value in response to the objectives set. It helps in tracking the progress in achieving a specific goal. The metric is considered a performance value that directly impacts the KPI.
From the relationship represented, we can derive the 3 marketing objective models, specifically, Traffic, Leads, and Sales models.
A diagram depicting the various constituents of the Traffic Model
In the above example, assuming a company sets its marketing objective as website traffic (sessions) and is targeting 10,000 website visits per month. The KPIs are split into both paid and unpaid sessions. Paid sessions are when your users click through to the website via paid ads.
By utilising web analytics, a company can use historical data from the previous year to know how many non-paid sessions the business has. Hence, by leveraging the data derived, it is possible to forecast the number of paid sessions that are needed to attain the desired marketing objective.
There are times when website visitors do not act according to expectations. You set out for the visitors to complete a certain desired action, but they might not complete the intended visitor’s journey on the website. This causes a drop-off in the user’s actions.
As a result, the marketer needs to have an effective strategy to generate more clicks to compensate for the drop-off rate. For example, if the marketer is looking for 100 paid sessions with an estimated 20% drop-off rate, 125 clicks will be required to achieve the target set.
By having different paid initiatives like Google or Facebook advertisements, it will help to achieve the required additional clicks. However, if the marketer aims to target more non-paid sessions, then there is a need to focus on areas relating to search engine optimisation (SEO) or partnerships with other websites through acquiring referring hyperlinks (backlinks) from them.
A diagram depicting the various constituents of the Leads Model
Taking the example of an air-con servicing business, the KPIs can be subdivided into both online bookings and online-to-offline. An online booking usually comes from a website through an enquiry form, whereas some prospects would prefer calling in for more immediate attention.
It is necessary to verify whether the calls-in are leads generated by digital marketing efforts. If it is an existing customer, then it will be disregarded as an online lead.
Leads from the online bookings are subdivided into 2 metrics: sessions and conversion rate. Sessions, also known as web traffic, are a common way to measure online business effectiveness in attracting an audience. More sessions will also directly impact the number of enquiries made through calls.
As for the conversion rate, it is the percentage of visitors coming to your website or landing page that converts. It could be in the form of:
A diagram depicting the various constituents of the Sales Model
Many businesses tend to base their marketing objectives on revenue. Referring to the diagram above, the multiplication of both Sales transactions and Average Order Value (AOV) will directly contribute to the marketing objective of achieving $1 million in 2020. AOV is especially important in e-commerce enterprises.
AOV is the average amount spent by customers on making online purchases. It is calculated by dividing the total revenue generated in a specified period by the total number of customer orders. For example, if an e-commerce retailer generated revenue of $100,000 in Feb 2019 with a total number of 1,000 purchase orders, the AOV for Feb 2019 would be $100. The formula is shown:
AOV = Total Revenue / Number of Orders Taken
Imagine a case scenario of an online clothing shop that retails 4 blouses, each priced at $15, $20, $25, and $30. After factoring in the sales revenue and number of orders, the AOV works out to be $22. You can deduce that:
To encourage online customers to purchase more than 1 item in a single transaction, you can implement these techniques as outlined below to improve the AOV.
Upselling encourages customers to purchase a more expensive item. An example would be a customer going to a hotel’s website to book a standard room. However, he may have chanced upon a good promotion and went ahead to book a higher-end suite instead.
Cross-selling is a method used to encourage customers to add products that are complementary to the originally purchased item. Going by the same example, right before the customer completes the hotel booking, he may have seen an amazing deal on a spa package and added it to the transaction as well.
Ultimately, if a business has a clear understanding of what its objectives are, it will be possible to align them to the relevant KPIs and metrics. This will not only let you know how your efforts are paying off, but also how you can further improve on them in the long term. If you want to read more on different KPIs for digital marketing, take a look at our Top 12 KPI lists for both Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Social Media.
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Zhong Li is the founder of Mikangle, a digital transformation company that focuses on advisory, training, and investment. He is also the Co-founder and now Advisor of Finty, an online financial marketplace that was acquired by an Australian firm, 15 months after the company was launched. View full profile >
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Zhong Li is the founder of Mikangle, a digital transformation company that focuses on advisory, training, and investment. He is also the Co-founder and now Advisor of Finty, an online financial marketplace that was acquired by an Australian firm, 15 months after the company was launched. View full profile >
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