6 Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for Marketing Success

With the start of the new year, you’re likely busy forecasting what you want to accomplish over the next several months. But have you tied specific metrics to those goals to define what success is for your business?

Part of the path to success as a business owner is not just goal-setting, but continually reporting on metrics tied to those goals.  Without defined KPIs, or key performance indicators, it’s impossible to evaluate whether you’ve actually hit the goals you set.

Perhaps you’re aiming to reduce call wait times, or to increase leads coming in via a certain channel. Setting specific KPIs will help you quantify your progress with data. For example, a contact center may set a KPI of a 20% reduction in call wait time this quarter, which would provide a benchmark to evaluate performance come April.

KPIs are easy to track with CallTrackingMetrics’ reporting tools, whether you’re looking for standard metrics or custom fields for your business. Below we’ve rounded up some of the top metrics your business may want to consider evaluating this year, plus how to report on them within CTM.

Key Performance Metrics to Consider

The most common metrics our customers look for in CTM are related to marketing attribution and call center solutions. For marketers, being able to understand where your calls are coming from is essential in order to optimize advertising campaigns and investment. In addition, many businesses (and especially contact centers) look to CTM to align that marketing attribution data with support tools such as call routing or keyword spotting.

The top metrics marketers may want to track and evaluate over time include:

• Visits by Source — which campaigns or channels are generating and converting the most leads?
• New vs. Repeat Visitors — what kind of users are visiting my page? How often are new visitors converting?
• Web Visits (filtering by search keyword, referring page, et. al.) — what keywords are users searching for to find my page? What were they looking at before they arrived on my site?

Understanding these metrics, and how they fluctuate depending on the marketing levers you shift, inform your strategy and help you determine the ROI of your efforts.

Clients looking for call center solutions tend to evaluate metrics that speak to how productive their team is in responding to customer inquiries and how satisfied customers are with their support interactions.

A few support-focused metrics to consider reporting on may be:

• Call Wait Time — how long are my customers waiting to be connected to a staff member? How does this impact their satisfaction score?
• Average Call Duration — are my agents handling support issues in a timely manner? Which calls take longer to resolve?
• Agent Performance — how are my individual staffers performing? How much time are they spending on phone calls versus chats, etc.?

Evaluating these metrics on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis provide a good pulse check for how your organization is serving your customers and can raise red flags when needed, such as if your ring time starts to increase. They also help inform your strategy in preparing for high-volume call times. Implementing conversation intelligence tools, such as call recordings, transcriptions, keyword spotting, scoring or tagging, helps you gain deeper insight into the content of your calls. 

Read More: What is Conversation Intelligence?

Popular Reports to Pull for KPI Monitoring

Within CTM, we have built some standard reports for you to review and export, but you may also build your own custom reports to expose the specific dimensions and metrics of your choosing. In addition to that, you can evaluate custom fields unique to your business. Want to know how many calls result in scheduled appointments? How many callers are interested in a particular product line? How many calls are associated with each sales lead in your organization? All can be analyzed with custom fields.

Our standard reports include:

Real Time Agent Report — a dashboard that displays live agent status and call stats. Within this report, you can see live inbound and outbound call activity, as well as monitor the activity of each agent in your account. This is helpful to evaluate in real-time the productivity of your team, ensure you have enough agents on staff to accommodate the volume of calls coming in, and optimize your support hours.

ROI Reports — allows you to see the financial performance of each advertising campaign as well as the performance of the people answering your phones. Once you’ve set up this report to assign sales numbers to calls as well as the advertising spend for that channel, you’ll be able to visualize the return on investment for each marketing campaign as well as which agents are driving sales for your organization.

Activity Reports — provides an overview of your calls over a set time period sorted by dimensions of your choosing. Use filters and date ranges to narrow down which calls you want to analyze and view by criteria such as source, hour of day, campaign, to organize call data in the way that’s most useful to you. For example, a contact center may want to review their top call hours to use for scheduling agents and staffing considerations. You would add a filter of dimension by hour to view when call volume spikes, and could take it a step further to analyze “Status” as well to visualize when you get the most “hang ups” so you know you need more agents on the line at that time. Marketers might consider creating an Activity report that lumps all paid campaigns together then inputs a secondary dimension of keyword to see what keywords are coming through which paid sources.

Custom Reports — dive into granular details specific to your business needs. You can see general stats about average ring/talk time, top keywords, average call duration by source, visits by source, etc. but can also drill down using filters to view calls by tag, see how many agents are using a particular keyword, or look at custom fields (available on Marketing Lite and Marketing Pro plans) such as Account ID or other metrics specific to your team.

Utilizing reports to evaluate the most pertinent metrics for your organization will keep you on top of how you’re pacing towards quarterly and yearly KPIs, allowing you to see your goals turn into reality in real time.