With an increasing amount of budget being allocated to online advertising, there is a greater demand for demonstrating results to justify the increased spend. KPIs will vary depending on an advertiser’s objectives but this post outlines five performance advertising KPIs that your team can be targeted with.
1. Increasing Sales Revenue
This is perhaps the most obvious and basic of KPIs but it is certainly one that your team should be targeted with. Beyond simply looking at the sales revenue as a top level figure, your teams should understand the publishers that are effective at driving significant volumes of sales revenue and work closely with these to increase revenues further. Additionally the impact of promotions should be monitored – whether this is promotions aimed at customers or incentives aimed at increasing affiliate activity.
2. Lifetime Value of Customers
understanding the revenue driven at the point of sale is a good indication of performance but how profitable are the customers driven on a long term basis? By analysing the lifetime value of customers driven, it is possible to make strategic business decisions. For example, there could be publishers that are able to drive customers that are more profitable in the long run despite having lower basket values for their first transaction. By monitoring these patterns it is possible to tweak promotions based on the type of customers they are driving. It is likely to be more profitable working closely with publishers that are able to generate customers with high life time value, than to target those who tend to deliver customers with a higher initial basket value that never return. With careful analysis and rolling out an effective strategy it is possible to benefit from the best of both worlds – those with a high value first order that return again and again.
3. Mobile Commerce
with consumer behaviour evolving, the devices being used to access the internet are changing. At Affiliate Window we see in excess of 35% of traffic and around 30% of sales originate from a mobile device. It is essential for advertisers to keep up with this switch between devices and ensure they are taking advantage of these mobile trends. Teams should be targeted with benchmarking mobile performance across others in their sector, understanding the split of traffic and transactions by device and also the publishers that are effective at generating mobile sales. As well as understanding the device type (smartphone, tablet etc) this can be monitored even further to look at the actual devices that are performing well. Are iPhone users spending more that their Android counterparts? How do the conversion rates vary? Additionally – are there peak days for mobile traffic that should be taken advantage of to increase conversions?
4. Improving Conversion Rates
In theory one of the easiest ways to increase sales is by improving your conversion rate. The higher the conversion rate, the greater the volume of visitors will transact. In practice though, conversion rate optimisation can be extremely difficult. It is important that any changes made to the site are closely monitored to assess the impact of these changes upon the conversion rate. This can be simple changes such as changing the call to action or moving the checkout button.
With the rise of mobile commerce and the nature of multi device consumers, conversion rates need to be monitored for all devices. In this day and age it is essential to have a site that has been optimised for mobile devices to ensure a smooth customer journey. Additionally, with almost half of emails opened on a mobile device in (according to a report from Knotice) not optimising email for mobile can have a major impact on conversion rates.
Remember, publishers will be attracted to promoting an advertiser that has a strong conversion rate.
5. Engaging Publisher Base
How engaged are the publishers that are signed up to your programme? With a number of publishers likely to sign up to promote your programme each week it is important to monitor their engagement rates. It is possible to determine how many of these are click active and how many are driving sales. Running incentives among publishers that have signed up but are yet to drive traffic/sales can be effective at re-engaging with them.
This is by no means an exhaustive list of KPIs to target your teams with, but it should provide you with a good starting point.