3 Hidden KPIs for the New Age CMO!

3 Hidden Brand KPIs for the New Age CMO!

As a Chief Marketing Officer (CMO); your team is investing in various channels like TV and radio. You can perhaps see an increase in overall traffic and pageviews!

But:
Are you happy with just the increasing trends of traffic (all sources)? Is that enough? What are the 3 KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) that you must see to decide the efficacy of your brand campaigns?

Come let’s find the 3 hidden Brand KPIs for the New Age CMOs:

1. % New Visits: Bottomline is that you want to reach more and more new users. After all you spend money on TV because you need more NEW VISITS (First time visits) on your site! That’s the foremost and most basic objective. So look at the trend of % new visits trend. If after spending millions, % new visits is trending down then there is some problem in your media plan.

(as you can see , branding campaign gave a boost to overall visits in July, however the % New Visits dropped.)

2. Organic search traffic contribution: When you use mass media, people will start searching your ‘brand’ more on Google. And not just that –you should also see more visits from ‘category keywords’. For e.g. if you are a baby products website, you should see an increasing traffic trend:
a. From overall organic search
b. From your brand term and
c. From specific keywords that define your category like ‘toys’ ‘diapers’ ‘baby shampoo’ etc. (because of the increased trust in your brand name)

Hence we should see the contribution % (not just volumes) of all the above increase if the branding campaign is successful.

To see the brand terms traffic, we can go through the following steps (in Google Analytics):

Step 1: Click on ‘Traffic Sources’ >’Sources’>Search>Organic

Step 2: On the mid-right side of the page click on ‘advanced’

Step 3: Write the name of your brand and ‘apply’

You will see visits from the brand terms.

3. Conversion Rate: essentially the quality of traffic: the traffic that comes after viewing your TV ads should trust you more and hence should ideally convert more. So look at overall conversion rates on the site. (Not just the conversion volume).

a) Conversion rate from brand search term traffic specifically
b) Conversion rate overall generally.

Click here to read Read an interesting infographic about more Brand-efficiency key metrics here.

Just bear in mind one thing that mass media is an expensive proposition, and hence as a CMO one needs to be prudent to accept that the above 3 metrics should show a conspicuously positive trend over time. If the campaign worked well, then just a small increment is not what you should be satisfied with.

One more thing; Normally, conversion rate trends are associated with product performance rather than marketing performance. However the CMO needs to be sure that he/she embarks on a branding campaign only when the product issues are sorted out and when the product is in a state to lend a delightful experience to users. Hence I will put 70% responsibility of the metric on the CMO’s shoulders.

Download an excel sheet which can track your brand efficacy (need to put data from google analytics)

Summary: