Digital Marketers are often guilty of focusing extra on short-term gains while losing sight of longer term goals.

It’s not that short aims aren’t required, but they have to be planned logically in order to get the very best out of a Digital Marketing campaign. When making that investment, Digital Marketers should be focusing on exact and easily measurable KPIs (Key performance indicator) which all add to the success of reaching long term goal.

It sounds quite logical, almost clear in fact. On the other hand, when short term goals are achieved, it is often simple to lose view of the end goal while celebrating temporary achievement.

Key Performance Indicators for digital marketing:

It’s all easy to pick out positive metrics and turn them into KPIs that end up forming your complete Digital Marketing goals with tools such as Google Analytics.

How many times have you come across your Click through rate (CTR) and made an intellectual note to make sure you’re doing your best to increase it? How frequently do you look at your average cost per click in AdWords and believe how high it is? How content do you find yourself after seeing a positive development in your average place?

It’s hard to look at figures such as these, and turn them into a “bigger picture”, because we’re so used to using short-term plan to decide which measures we should take.

Many of us use these metrics on a daily basis and it’s all too simple to make these KPIs at the heart of our attention 100% of the time. Instead we should be thinking about whether these statistics in fact mean something in the long term or not.

Longer term digital marketing goal

Unfortunately, minimizing your losses is not always a great approach for growing your business – what happens when you’ve tried the whole thing, with no fortune? Do you give up? Do you give up trying to grow your business because nothing’s worked so far? No, you try again with a different approach and you ask for help from experts in the tools you’re using.

As marketers, what we should actually be thinking about is whether keywords are playing a role in achieving longer term goals, such as the progress of a particular part of a business. The answer to this type of query isn’t answered by looking at “profit per conversion”.

It can, however, be answered by analyzing past keyword figures and using the right metrics to evaluate whether every individual keyword has been used to find your website, before a conversion was accomplished by a customer searching another keyword later on.

This is thinking long-term; not giving up on a keyword because it hasn’t openly produced a change, but rather analyzing whether it’s had an effect at all – and if so, has it been positive? Imagine about what might go off if you paused or deleted that keyword, and whether you would actually want to risk losing out on those conversions, merely because users weren’t converting directly after searching the keyword.

Moving Forward

Next time you look at your Digital Marketing strategy or even a small part of it, be it Social Media Management, Content Marketing, PPC, SEO or even Email Marketing, just take a bit of time to think about whether the goals you have achieved in the last few months have actually had an impact on your long term growth as a business.

If the answer is no, think about how you could change your strategy to make sure that this over-all end goal is always in sight across all your channels. In a nutshell; don’t ask whether something has worked – ask whether it’s contributed to the success or failure to your end goal so far. Then alter your strategy based on the answer.