The Secret of High Level Organic KPIs

There’s a huge variety of online marketing metrics for you to chose from. Many of them are either essentially useless (pageviews) or too granular to tell a real story on a site-wide level (bounce-rate).

If  you’re the CMO or VP of Marketing, what KPI’s do you really need to see so that you’re reasonably well informed about the performance of your organic search program against the half-dozen other channels you’re responsible for?

I had a great question from a client this week wondering if they should move from 2 KPI’s to 3 for their high level dashboards.

Hey Chris, quick question: other than traffic and revenue, what do you
think a good third high level KPI should be? The number of keywords driving traffic,
pages indexed vs pages submitted? Or are those too granular?

This is one of those questions that can spark an amazing discussion. I asked the rest of our team to weigh in, and here’s some of their thoughts.

  • Dollar out, Dollar in. Organic investment (agency fees & in-house cost) vs the return.
  • Conversions: newsletter sign-ups, whitepaper downloads, etc.
  • In some cases, bounce rate (or other engagement indicators) may be relevant, depending on the strategic goals of the team.
  • % of traffic from Search vs. direct or referral (break this down further to traffic from natural search)
  • Ratio of non-branded vs. branded terms that are driving traffic
  • Engagement mentions and social signals.

It’s tough to pick one more without flooding your exec with data they’re not likely to understand anyways.

In the end we decided on # of keywords driving traffic (and conversions thereof), which supports both general optimization, their content creation strategy and their community building efforts.

What about you? If there’s only 3 organic metrics you can show to the C-Suite or your Board of Directors, which ones do you pick?

Comments are closed.