Semalt: Measuring Digital KPIs Is Essential To Run A Business
What does KPI mean? KPI is an abbreviation that stands for Key Performance Indicator that is traditionally used by economists to measure how a company works and how well a business is doing. In recent years, the term has been increasingly used in digital marketing to measure market efficiency and the company's customers' journey. The following key figures are necessary for you, your management team, marketing manager, communications manager, or webmaster.
How are KPIs used by companies?
Key performance indicators are used in medium and large listed companies to improve performance and should be seen as a tool for measuring that development is moving in the right direction consistently and predictably. It is essential to use the right dimensions and commercially relevant information that can also be used in business planning. But with the multitude of tools and measures available, it can be difficult to find your way through the jungle.
You can use key figures to measure the effectiveness of digital marketing and to manage your marketing team strategically and tactically. We believe that many marketers should take a greater interest in analytics and the various KPIs, which means they can better track market investments and get employees focused on the right things.
KPIs should be based on business objectives according to who should be involved in decision making
There are several digital KPIs that you can use to measure how well a website works. It is often a matter of developing methods to increase sales or improve results in some way.
- To begin with, it is necessary to base your digital KPIs on the company's business goals and what purpose you have with your website. Is the purpose of the e-сommerce website to obtain leads to the sales force, be a publishing site that shows ads, or is it a site that will provide customer support?
- The second question is who should use the statistics? We have produced statistics for a CEO of an international company who only wanted a number, a number to be able to compare different countries' digital investments with each other.
- The third question is which websites should be measured? It is not enough to use Google Analytics and dashboards in analytics, but you may need more powerful KPI tools like the Dedicated Seo Dashboard and sales support programs that are integrated into the statistics.
Once you know more about the amount of data and who will use it, you can start setting up experiments such as AB testing. Here different methods include visual analysis when the data material is extensive, but also traditional statistics such as correlation analysis and regression analysis to see if there is a correlation between 2 different variables.
Different types of KPIs that you can use!
KPI measurements for an online shop
ROI is ultimately based on conversions that can come from different channels: organic traffic, direct traffic, email, external websites, social media, and more.
The value of an online shop can be calculated in IT with the following formula:
B = V × C × L
- B = Sales on the website
- V = Unique visitors to the website
- C = conversion rate (percentage of people who become customers)
- L = Loyalty rate (ie if there are repeated purchases)
KPIs are usually set monthly so that you can follow developments. For a webshop, important measures are sales, repurchases, orders, and average order value.
Other parts of a webshop are about the actual experience of the site, and the traffic and measures such as unique visitors, bounce rate, conversions, etc., are used.
KPI measures to create more leads and increase sales
- Profit margin
- Operating profit margin
- Net profit margin
- How often your contact page is used online
- How many leads come in over the phone
- If a specific company you are contacting visits your site
- Average order value and TB1 (gross margin 1)
- Proportion of new customers
- How many people convert for newsletters, whitepapers, etc.
When you want to measure the strength of the company and its brands
- Percentage of direct visitors to the website ( some of these, however, come from dark social)
- The percentage of Google searches for trademarked searches
- Google searches for the brand and how they change over time
When you want to measure the performance of the website

A KPI report can be created from different systems, but sooner or later, much of the information ends up in Excel, so you can follow the results month after month.
I often see which business areas there are and see how they go by measuring segments and keywords within the business area vs competitors. Other traditional measurements are:
- Unique Visitors, Visits, and Pageviews
- How long they are on the site on average (session length)
- How many pages are they on average
- Onsite optimization measures to measure the quality of the content
- Offsite optimization measures to measure link quality (ex Trustflow, domain authority, etc.)
- Proportion of 404s, ie sides that are wrong (there are sharp and soft 404s)
- Digital conversion rate, usually between 2-3%
- Search engine ranking (by keywords) and clickthrough rate
- Pageviews
- Average time on pages
- Bounce rate
- How well different editors and content managers perform on the site
- How many people visit contact pages
- Number of active leads that, for example, fill in a contact form
- Number of passive leads
- Traffic to lead generation
- Lead to customer ratio
- (Shares + links) / 1000 visitors
- Total number of visits sessions / returning visitors
- The speed of the site measured in milliseconds (page speed)
- Traffic sources (where visitors come from)
- Proportion of mobile users
- Conversion rate for sales and leads
- Conversion rate for specific landing pages
- Organic visibility and search results on keywords
- Organic sessions
- Keyword ranking
- Pagerank (although not updated in a few years but can still provide some guidance on a website)
- The speed of the site measured in milliseconds and loading time (page load)
- Branded searches (Branded vs non-branded traffic)
- Statistics about the brand and how much you apply for the brand
- Online sales revenue
- Percentage that joins newsletters
- CTR - Click through rate - what percentage clicks on your titles, which you can measure in Google Search Control
- Backlinks
- Target conversions for organic traffic
Use segments in Google Analytics
In Google Analytics, a very useful feature is called "segments" that allows you to see how the site works for different specific pages, languages, or mobile users.
When you want to measure the effectiveness of your digital advertising
The measurement of digital advertising varies depending on whether you are setting up a branding campaign or a site that will convert.
Conversion tracking and goal tracking can be set up in Google Analytics, and there are several different tools to measure KPIs directly for Google Ads.
The measurements to look at are:
- ROI on advertising (there are concepts such as ROAS and POAS)
- Costs in total value
- Impressions
- Click
- Converted clicks
- PPC - Pay Per Click
- Cost per lead (in Adwords, Bing, Facebook)
- Customer value (value minus TB1)
- CTR - Click Through Rate - what percentage clicks on your Adwords texts
- Quality score, ie if your landing pages and Adwords ads harmonize
- RPM = Dimensions for Advertisers (Estimated Revenue / Pageviews) × 1,000
- Different goal conversions for paid traffic
- What percentage comes from the mobile and generates some value
- Have new visitors have the same KPIs as returning visitors
- Attribution models and how customers become customers
- What do the KPIs look like for different segments (organic traffic, paid traffic, and direct traffic)
Overall ad KPIs
- COS: Cost of Sales. The ratio between the total advertising cost and sales generated by the campaign. In other words, what your advertising costs as a percentage of revenue. COS shows what your margins are for raising or lowering your advertising.
- CAC: Customer Acquisition Cost
- ROAS: Return on Ad Spending
- CLV: Customer Lifetime Value
- Retention: Number of returning customers divided by the total number of customers
KPIs to measure social media
- Social networks
- Social Media Reach
- Percentage of followers for the largest social networks (Facebook, Insta, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest)
Different KPIs to measure the efficiency of apps
Apps can be measured on what the sales tunnel looks like (funnel) and how the app works. Common measurements are:
- Impressions
- Clicks
- The app is installed and opened
- One signs up in the app
- Different types of requests in the app
Want to know more about digital KPIs?
There is an advantage to having an outsider do an independent KPI analysis of your digital presence. We can give you insights into how well your company's digital marketing works. We have tools where we use data from various sources such as Google Search Console, Google Analytics, competitors, and keywords. This means that you get a tailored report on how your website works. Our methods with the Dedicated Seo Dashboard ensure that the marketing department, as well as the communication department and the development department, work effectively with the company's website and SEO.
Contact us if you want to know more about KPIs for your company and what measures you can use in your it!