How To Choose Marketing KPIs
Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs, are the backbone of your hotel’s digital marketing. They inform decisions about marketing channels, help with campaign optimization, and, most importantly, let you measure the success of your marketing efforts.
But how do you choose the right marketing KPIs for your hotel?
If you focus on too many KPIs, your digital marketing campaigns start to get muddy. You can’t optimize for everything simultaneously, especially if your KPIs relate to multiple goals. Revenue and awareness are in direct opposition to each other since a high-revenue campaign requires a highly qualified audience. Broader reach means less qualified traffic, so you can’t have it both ways.
Instead of trying to perform well across the board, determine your hotel’s main goal and choose your marketing KPIs from there. Below, we’ve listed some suggested KPIs based on your primary digital marketing goal.
Revenue-Focused Marketing KPIs
If your hotel wants to increase cash flow with your digital marketing, choose KPIs that relate directly to bookings.
Conversions and Revenue
Looking at the raw amount of conversions, along with their value, is a great way to determine how much money is being generated by your digital marketing campaigns.
Conversion rate (CVR)
A high conversion rate usually indicates a high number of bookings per ad, also suggesting a high revenue for your campaign.
Return On Ad Spend (ROAS)
ROAS is arguably the best measure of a campaign’s profitability, giving you the best reference point for your bottom line.
Awareness-Focused Marketing KPIs
If you are looking to target as many people as possible with your digital marketing, choose KPIs that measure reach.
Impressions
Impressions are awareness in their purest form, referring to the potential number of eyeballs on your ad. This KPI doesn’t tell you anything about follow-through, but it does give you a general sense of brand reach.
Clicks
Driving people to your site is a step above showing them your ad. Actively engaging with your content makes your hotel more memorable, making clicks a slightly more accurate representation of awareness than impressions.
Impression Share/Market Share
Part of building awareness is cutting through the noise; impression share can help determine if you’re doing so successfully. While this KPI is not available for all campaigns, high impression share suggests that you’re being shown more than competing hotels and online travel agencies, creating recognition for your own brand.
Mixed-Focus Marketing KPIs
If you truly can’t decide on just one goal, choose KPIs that measure a little bit of both. Neither revenue nor awareness will be as strong without a focused goal, but these are great middle-of-the-road KPIs for an overall balanced performance.
Cost Per Click (CPC)
A low cost per click suggests high efficiency in your campaigns, squeezing your budget for max awareness without sacrificing profitability.
Cost Per Conversion
Cost per conversion is similar, giving you the best bang for your buck by increasing revenue and ROAS without the inherent need for a small audience.
Clickthrough Rate (CTR)
CTR, like conversion rate, suggests a qualified audience with a decent number of interactions per ad. However, CTR allows a bit more breathing room, letting a few non-converters through for the sake of more clicks. It’s an effective middle ground between engagement and eyeballs.
Takeaways
Choosing a KPI for your hotel’s digital marketing comes down to prioritizing one goal for your campaigns. The real trick is understanding that you can’t have everything at once and deciding which elements of your business’ success to focus on.
If you’d like more help with KPIs or want to get started with digital marketing, contact GCommerce Solutions using this link.
