8 Critical Marketing KPIs to Track This Holiday Season

The holiday season is upon us, and so begins the frenzy with brands and marketers alike to capitalize on the hopping season. With Black Friday and Cyber Monday in the rearview mirror, It is petal to the metal right now for businesses and influences to hit their end-of-year goals.

While marketers and brands are channeling all their energies into ideating, developing, and executing their marketing campaigns, KPIs can easily get lost in all the madness. Truth be told, holiday marketing KPIs should be no different from the metrics measured in traditional marketing KPIs reports. However, given the shopping frenzy, it is essential to track some metrics more keenly over the others. Read on in case you are wondering what KPIs should you be monitoring this holiday season?

What Are Marketing KPIs?

Let’s start with the basics and understand what KPIs for marketing mean. Marketing KPIs definition can be simply put as the quantifiable measurement that is used by businesses and marketers to evaluate the effectiveness of any marketing campaign. Without sales and marketing KPIs, no company can ever be sure what is the return on the investments and could even end up spending their way into bankruptcy. Here are the top marketing KPIs 2021 holiday season marketers should definitely be looking into.

Return on Investment (ROI), The Fundamental Marketing KPI

This is, by far, one of the critical marketing KPIs of all times, regardless of the time of year. Simply put, this metric, one of the most essential marketing campaign KPIs, is the measure of comparing the revenue generated for the money spent on marketing. When the company’s marketing operations deliver a positive ROI, that is when the entire campaign, be it a regular campaign or a holiday marketing campaign, can be called a success

ROI(%) = (Total Revenue- Total Cost/Total Cost) x 100

Impressions and Reach Help With Marketing Funnel KPIs

Impressions refer to the number of customers viewing (which may or may not lead to clicking the ad) an advertisement created by a business to introduce their product and service to prospective customers. During the holiday season, if a marketer were to be asked what marketing KPIs they would like to track, impressions would perhaps be one of the first in their list of holiday marketing KPIs.

The idea behind any holiday marketing is usually to expose as many customers to the products or services that a business offers. By tracking the impressions, marketers are able to measure the effectiveness of their advertisement campaigns. Impressions help businesses make measured and data-oriented decisions for their marketing campaigns and their customer buying journey. Impressions play a crucial role during the holiday season as the customers are usually ready to make their purchases. These advertisements can actually nudge the customers to buy from the business or not.

Click-Through Rates Help Measure The Users Interest

When it comes to holiday marketing campaigns, impressions working independently are useless unless a customer interacts with the ad or clicks on it. This interaction is measured by click-through rates. A customer is taking the extra effort to engage with the advertisement through either a click or through providing their email address, or just their name signifies the campaign’s success for the brand.

Whether the holiday marketing campaign is created as part of a business’s video marketing KPIs, marketing KPIs for B2B, product marketing KPIs or growth marketing KPIs, click-through rates help measure the user’s interests in the business’s products and services. To see how your CTR compares to others in your industry, check out WordStream’s benchmarks here.

CTR = (Clicks/Impressions) x 100

Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) Helps Measure The Cost Incurred To Win A Customer Over

The KPI metrics marketing teams use to measure the actual cost incurred to win a customer is called cost-per-acquisition. This metric comes into force once a casual browser has converted with the business and has generated sales. From a business point of view, the lower the CPA, the higher the company’s returns. To win the customer, businesses typically run holiday campaigns across channels and across various platforms. The buyers’ journey for any brand may not be the same for every platform the business advertises.

Similarly, the kind of campaign a business runs on one platform may not be the same as what they would run on another. Using CPA, businesses would be able to identify the performance of the campaigns across all the platforms and identify which campaign and platform helped them acquire a customer at the lowest cost. This also allows them to strategize and plan their future campaigns.

CPA = Total cost / # of conversions

• 

The Average Order Value (AOV) Helps Determine Advertising Spends, Discounts

This is perhaps the most critical metric from a business point of view. AOV is the average amount spent by a consumer on each order. Why would this be critical from a holiday marketing point of view? Well, what’s the point of spending heavily on any holiday marketing campaign if the company does not see an increase in the revenue, despite higher conversions.

There could be many reasons for a flat revenue line from a business point of view, i.e.discounts being offered to consumers as a part of the campaign is one. AOV helps businesses analyze this gap and design strategies to increase the same. Based on the AOV, companies decide their advertising and marketing spending, forecast their revenues, and, in some cases, even rework their product pricing

AOV=Total revenue/# of orders

ROAS- Return on Advertising spends

Return on advertising spend (ROAS) is a measure that evaluates the efficiency of a marketing campaign and assists you in determining which approaches are productive and which need to be changed. Unlike ROI, which considers all related expenses, ROAS just evaluates advertising spending.

You might wonder what constitutes a good ROAS. Several factors, like your margins and industry, determine a “good” ROAS. As a general rule, anything above 2X ROAS is usually recommended. Remember that CPCs and CPMs tend to climb over the holiday season, so you might not be able to accomplish the same ROAS goal as you did earlier in the year.

ROAS= Revenue from Ads/Advertising Spends

Conversion Rate (CR)

You want a user to take action on your website once they’ve interacted with your material. The desired action counted as a conversion for eCommerce shops may be completing a purchase or adding an item to a cart.

Something is wrong if your ad has 9,000 clicks but no conversions. Maybe your content isn’t up to date, or you’re marketing to the incorrect target audience. Conversion tracking and conversion rate (CR) analysis lets you make the required modifications to boost your ROI.

Email Performance

Email is typically the greatest method to get your holiday promotions in front of consumers during the holiday season. Click-through rates are the most important KPIs to measure from your holiday email advertising (CTR). This measure displays how well your brand’s promotional emails drove visitors to your eCommerce site. Here are some more essential email indicators to consider while evaluating email performance:

• Open Rate: The number of subscribers that opened the email.
• Conversion Rate: The number of persons who took an activity on a page after clicking via email.
• Bounce Rate: The percentage of subscribers who did not get the email.
• Unsubscribes: This is the number of persons who opt-out of receiving emails. This is a fantastic way to tell whether your emails are becoming too spammy.

Email CRT= Emails Clicked / Emails Sent-Bounces

Conclusion

While we have covered the 8 critical KPIs for this holiday season above, there are many other KPIs that companies may prefer to track, depending upon their business needs and marketing targets. Spending on advertising and holiday marketing for business would be futile if not tracked using these essential metrics.

To achieve success, businesses need to align their holiday marketing KPIs to the internal goals they have set for the year and keep monitoring the same regularly. And remember, as times change, so should the brand’s holiday marketing KPIs and strategy.

Are You Making the Most Out of Your Marketing Profession?

Marketing is a fulfilling career and has a lot of revenue generation potential. You just need to identify your core skills and then find a way of monetizing them. Start your own marketing business, create a winning strategy, build an online presence, and then set your career objectives. Once you lay the foundation for your marketing side hustles, you should then list the possible services you can offer and start networking.

Did you know you can also make extra money by answering surveys regularly? Register on TheExpertCafé community as an engaged member and enjoy a joining bonus of $50 and subsequently earn up to $100 per survey.