What are your key performance indicators?

How are you determining whether your plans are succeeding? KPI’s are a way to keep score of your progress, and they can apply to anything from a bagel shop to a bagel blog.

Wikipedia defines KPI as:

A performance indicator or key performance indicator (KPI) is a measure of performance.

[1] Such measures are commonly used to help an organization define and evaluate how successful it is, typically in terms of making progress towards its long-term organizational goals

[2]. KPIs can be specified by answering the question, “What is really important to different stakeholders?”. KPIs may be monitored using Business Intelligence techniques to assess the present state of the business and to assist in prescribing a course of action. The act of monitoring KPIs in real-time is known as business activity monitoring (BAM). KPIs are frequently used to “value” difficult to measure activities such as the benefits of leadership development, engagement, service, and satisfaction.

Blogging and social media are great tools (remember, they’re just tools) for building a business and spreading messages online, but if you don’t keep track of your activities then how can you possibly determine victories and losses — especially if there’s money involved?

For all you newbies, rising stars, and old-school professionals out in the blogosphere, check out these five key KPI’s to track your social media and guerrilla marketing success:

1. Average Time on Site
2. Number of Pages Viewed Per Visit
3. Form Submissions
4. Bounce Rate
5. Referral Traffic

Understanding KPI and What They Mean for Your Site

The average time on site tells you how engaged viewers are with your content. Three seconds is a terrible time on site average, but three minutes is very respectable, especially for new sites. Your goal should be to increase this number by checking which posts are most read and what pages your visitors linger on. Once you understand how users interact with your site, make it stickier.

Number of pages viewed might seem similar to time on site, but while it is also a measure of engagement, there’s a hidden gem not to be overlooked in these numbers. Blogs and websites with higher page views per visit typically have smarter on-page SEO than less successful sites. Ask yourself: How well do I link to other popular pages and posts in my most current material? How does my cross-referencing and linking benefit visitors and enhance their overall experience (I ask myself this one all the time)?

Form submissions isn’t just for paid advertising, it’s as important for the everyday blogger as it is for an established e-business. Forms can be as simple as a feedburner email subscription box that delivers your blog to the email of readers, or it can be a detailed way of learning about your audience in exchange for their name and email address. This practice is often referred to as list building, and the larger your list of subscribers, the more weight your messages and content carry (in terms of distribution, profit, awareness, or whatever your individual goal is).

How bouncy is your website?

Bounce rate will affect the form submissions, pages viewed, and time on site directly because it refers to the place where people exit your site. For example, a bounce rate of 75% for a website page means 75% of the visitors entered on that page and left without discovering any other content. Not good.

Reducing your bounce rate isn’t as simple as checking a box though. You need to listen to your audience for what they want to read, distribute and label the content in ways that attract viewers to your site and then follow-up with intriguing methods of sending them deeper (Copyblogger is a great site for learning more about this). Your site is a living thing, and making changes that drive better numbers isn’t just good for making prettier spreadsheets, it shows you how well you engage with your intended audience. So don’t go crazy looking for huge spikes, it’s cool to get small but steady results.

Finally, consider where your referral traffic is coming from and how much it dips or grows. For example, perhaps your Twitter referrals have plateaued, but your TechCrunch referrals are growing (let’s just assume you leave intelligent comments that drive visits). If you find that TechCrunch visitors are more likely to submit a form, buy a product, or simply view more pages than Twitter users, you know how to market your content more effectively, and that’s huge!

In other words, don’t get stuck on getting thousands of referrals from really popular websites. Learn where your most profitable traffic comes from and consider how to grow it (strategic alliances, guest posting…there’s a long list of possibilities).

You’re doing a killer job if you’ve read this entire post, because it shows how committed you are to the metrics that lead to the success all of us bloggers ans social media people. My advice is to build a simple spreadsheet and get started tracking the five KPI’s we just discussed, then add more as needed.

Before you forget…Download Your Free Inbound Marketing Kit and Kick Some KPI Butt!

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