Plan: Create a Measurement Plan with Key Performance Indicators

Now that you have your customer journey mapped out, it’s time to identify the key performance indicator (KPI) metrics that will contribute and/or impact your goal.

“Metrics” refer to the terms/units used as a standard of measurement for each marketing channel. They are either used as a key performance indicator or serve as a diagnostic measurement for your analysis.

1. Key Performance Indicator (KPI) Metrics – Metrics that “indicate” goal achievement or how close you’ve come (e.g., # of shoes sold during campaign period)
2. Diagnostic Metrics – Metrics that can affect and support KPIs (e.g., in order for customers to buy shoes, they must “visit” the site in order to make a purchase via different traffic sources – Jane must pay attention to which the diagnostic “visits” by traffic source may affect her shoes sold “KPI”)

Example:
KPI = Total Shoes Sold 1,200

In the above example, the KPI is total amount of shoes sold on the website. To further understand where the visitors came from before purchasing the shoes, we looked into traffic source visits as the diagnostic metric.

Online activities are usually easier to track and will provide you a fuller “end-to-end” view of your marketing effectiveness. Most online platforms have either a built-in analytics tool or support third party integration. Offline, on the other hand, is tougher but not totally impossible. For example, unlike online banners or emails which has hyperlinks to bring users to your website, a prospect who may have seen your poster ad could potentially visit your website through either searching on Google or entering your website address. It is therefore difficult to attribute a traffic source that is a direct influence of an offline activity.

Offline tracking techniques such as the use of vanity URLs, QR Codes and unique promotion codes are commonly used to help identify traffic influenced by offline marketing efforts. We will discuss measurement techniques in more detail in the next section.

Commonly Used Key Performance Metrics and Diagnostic Metrics

A marketing tactic typically has multiple metrics that could fall under different stages in the customer journey. These metrics are usually universal which means they are commonly recognised across different tools. For ease of reference, please refer to the matrix table below for commonly used marketing channels and their respective key measurement metrics.