The most effective digital marketing campaigns have strategic objectives.

I once heard that a vision without a plan is just a hallucination. From time-to-time, I find myself catching a business day dreaming. Meaning, they are highly engaged with digital marketing campaigns without determining how digital marketing benefits all aspects of their business.

Some companies focus on superficial metrics to drive their objectives. To truly move a business forward, however, a deeper dive into the overall impact of digital marketing is required.

When determining the digital marketing objectives for you business, you must establish Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that reveal the benefit that digital marketing has on your bottom line.

In this post, I will focus on KPIs for business operations, marketing outcomes, customer service, customer behavior, and website performance.

Here are 30 must have digital marketing objectives for your business.

I’ll start with listing key metrics that contribute to business…

Business Contribution

• Online revenue contribution – How much revenue was generated online and referred from offline activity.
• Online profit contribution – This is the percentage of the profit derived from digital marketing.
• Online service transaction contribution – Since the percentage of online sales may differ from the percentage of revenue contribution as a result of different order values.
• Online reach percentage – Share of online users attracted to the site in an industry category in a week or month assessed by services such as Hitwise or Netratings.
• Online market share – Percentage of online market revenue captured in comparison with offline. This is difficult to establish in some markets, dependent on industry collaboration.
• Online customer migration – Percentage of existing customers using online services.

Marketing Outcomes

• Sales
• Leads – registrations or other opportunities to sell.
• Cost per Acquisition (CPA) – a Promotional cost of obtaining a first-time sale.
• Other costs – Cost of goods sold and average margin. The cost of service.
• Average order value – cart size.
• Lifetime value – for different customer segments.
• Average touch frequency – for example, email marketing.

Customer Service

• Customer satisfaction index.
• Number of comments from site and email – percentage of favorable and unfavorable comments.
• Brand metrics – brand favorability.
• Site performance and availability.
• Email inquiry response time and accuracy.

Customer Behavior

• Site engagements rates – total bounce rates for your overall site and specific pages.
• Site conversion rates – a visit to sale, visit-to-opportunity and opportunity-to-sale.
• Email conversion rates – Newsletter and campaign related.
• Visits to purchase/Time to purchase – an indication of a number of visits involved with the purchase.
• Number of products purchased per customer.
• Transaction behavior – Recency, Frequency, Monetary value analysis for different categories and customer types. Reach Frequency analysis also relevant for site visits, email response, and different service types.
• Activity or participation levels – Percentage of the customer base over registrations who are actively using online services. Determine who is Activated, Active, Dormant, or Lapsed, etc.
• Loyalty or churn metrics – Percentage of customer’s repeat purchasing during a period of time e.g. one year.

Web Site

• Referrer mix – referrals from direct, search and affiliate sources.
• Share of search – For the main terms within your market.
• Cost Per Click – average click per search visitor and Cost Per Thousand (CPM) for online ads.

Final Thoughts

I suggest avoiding a “one-size-fits-all” approach when establishing digital marketing objectives for your business. The best method, however, is to define metrics to identify how digital marketing contributes to business objectives outside the marketing silo.

Overall, defining your objectives is a critical to your digital marketing success. Superficial metrics provide insights on a very narrow objects. If you want to convey great digital marketing ROI, start by measuring its contribution outside of superficial marketing objectives.

Can you think of two more important KPIs for digital marketing attribution?