American engineer W. Edwards Deming once said, “You can’t manage what you don’t measure.” If you’re not designating key performance indicators and analyzing your campaigns, then you’re basically wasting your marketing efforts and dollars. Marketing without measurement is like throwing darts at a dartboard while wearing a blindfold.

A key performance indicator, or KPI, is a type of performance measurement that can help you better understand the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. To choose the right KPIs for your jewelry marketing, you must have clear and specific goals in place and a plan for achieving those goals. In this blog post, we’ll discuss some of the most common KPIs used by ecommerce jewelry brands across multiple marketing platforms, including website, search engines, email, and social media; explain how you can measure these KPIs; and shed light on when they’re appropriate to use.

Website Traffic – If you exclusively sell your jewelry on your website, and no one’s coming to your website, then you have a problem. You can’t set goals or create a strategy for increasing your website traffic if you aren’t aware of your current traffic or what you’d like it to be in the future. If you’re not already monitoring your site using Google Analytics, then you need to connect your website to this indispensable free tool, which can help you better understand changes in your traffic.

With Google Analytics, you’ll not only be able to notice changes in your traffic, but you’ll also be able to monitor other KPIs like new visitors vs. returning visitors, time on site, bounce rate, and more. Tracking website traffic is especially important during the growth phase of your jewelry business, when you’re simply trying to do everything you can to get more potential customers to visit your website. As time goes on, you may want to get more specific with your website monitoring KPIs and set up things like funnels and content groups in Google Analytics.

Social Media Reach and Engagement – Most people who use social media marketing to promote their businesses have noticed that organic reach (the number of people who see your posts) is not what it used to be, especially when it comes to Instagram and Facebook. This article from SocialInsight.io explains that very soon businesses will have zero organic reach because the makers of Instagram and Facebook “don’t want you to be able to reach your target market without paying to reach it.” However, before that time comes, you should still be aware of your reach because it’s an important KPI no matter what you’re trying to achieve with your social media marketing strategy.

While you’re moving forward with social media marketing, you’ll also likely want to measure your engagement, since engagement can shed light on how many people are actively interacting with your posts, rather than simply “liking” them. Other social media KPIs include follower or fan count, total likes, average likes, click-through rate, and more. To measure these KPIs, you’ll want to enlist the help of a tool like Iconosquare, which is an analytics tools for Instagram and Facebook.

Ecommerce Conversion Rate – If you’re beyond the growth phase of your jewelry brand, and you’re putting marketing strategies in place to increase your sales, then you must be aware of your ecommerce conversion rate. This KPI tracks how many people make a purchase after visiting your website. Once you know your conversion rate, you can take appropriate steps to increase conversions, like making your site easier to navigate, adding incentives like coupon codes, and including robust product information along with beautiful and clear product photography. To track conversion rate, you can use Google Analytics, and you can dig even deeper into ecommerce conversion with KPIs like shopping cart abandonment.

Search Engine Visibility – Are your customers finding your website? If your website isn’t ranking on the first page of Google search results for your targeted keywords, then you may never get seen. Search engine visibility refers to how well your website is ranking in search results across the keywords you’re tracking. For example, if you want your site to be ranked for “diamond engagement rings”, then search engine visibility would help you understand how you rank for that keyword term. This KPI is especially important for new brands hoping to be discovered by customers, and to track this KPI you’d need to use a paid tool like Ahrefs or consult with a search engine marketing consultant.

Email Click-Through Rate – If you actively send email marketing campaigns to your customers, then you’ll likely want to track click-through rate, especially since the goal of most emails is to get your prospective customers off the email and onto your site, where they’ll hopefully make a purchase. Of course, you could also measure other KPIs like unsubscribe rate, open rate, and subscriber growth rate. However, click-through rate is very useful if you’re focused specifically on conversions.

To measure click-through rate, you could use the built-in analytics provided by your email marketing platform, like Mailchimp. Or, you could add a UTM parameter to the links you want to track in your email. From there, you could check Google Analytics to see how many people visited your website by clicking through the email.

These five KPIs are just a very small sampling of all the ways you can measure and track your marketing performance and are by no means representative of all the ways you can and should be evaluating your data. In fact, depending on your goals, these KPIs may not even be relevant to you at the present moment. While some KPIs are more useful for short-term marketing campaigns, others are essential for long-term marketing efforts – but the truth is that no two jewelry brands will need all the same KPIs at the same time.

Choosing the right KPIs is a highly individualized process that can change and evolve over time for your jewelry brand. An experienced and knowledgeable marketing consultant can not only help you identify the right KPIs but also point you to industry benchmarks, so you know what to expect from your results and understand how to interpret your data.