Four Key Performance Indicators All Laundry Owners Need to Track
I’m going to make you do some math in this article. But I promise it’s the good kind of math – the kind that lets you know if your marketing plan is actually doing some good for your laundromat business.
2022 should be the year you knuckle down on marketing KPIs (key performance indicators) for your business. These data points can help you make informed decisions about your marketing in all areas. If you don’t already know what to look for, or if you need a refresher for the new year, then let this article be the place you start.
KPI #1: Traffic + Sources
Traffic, also called website traffic, refers to the number of visitors to your website at large, as well as specific pages on your site.
Tracking this metric will allow you to see a mile-high level of success, but keep in mind that it’s not the end-all of metrics. It’s a helpful milestone to get you to bigger decisions down the road.
There are two important lenses to use when tracking your traffic:
- What pages the traffic goes to on your site
- How people find and navigate to those pages
For example, you may have a popular blog post that you shared on social media, which yields a lot of traffic. You may find future blogs on that topic shared via social to be a valuable tool, and you can make that call with these lenses in focus.
The variation on these two focuses when assessing your traffic can be almost limitless, and will only grow as digital innovations continue. Thankfully, you’ll usually find that patterns emerge in strong sources of website traffic, and you can quickly see what works for newer marketing efforts. That’s the value of knowing what to look for.
KPI #2: Conversion Rate
Conversion rate is a percentage that tells you the success of a given page or website toward its goal. Calculating this rate requires that you track a few other data points – the first being traffic.
The second data point to track is your conversions. Conversions are any action taken on your site, but we mostly use them toward specific goals. These goals can be obtaining a lead, a sale or a variety of other actions that you find valuable.
Being able to track and attribute these actions clearly is a foundational aspect of digital marketing. There are services that collect both conversion and traffic statistics accurately, and I highly recommend researching them.
Once you have both your traffic to a page and an accurate look at conversions, you can calculate the conversion rate.
The formula to remember is: (Conversions / Traffic) x 100 = CR
As an example, let’s say you drive 1,000 visitors to a page, and 35 of them make a purchase. This would be found as: (35/1000) x 100 = 3.5 percent conversion rate. Or, 3.5 percent of visitors to that page became customers. You can see how knowing this number is crucial to tracking success rates over time.
KPI #3: SERPs Ranks
SERPs stands for search engine results pages, and whether you know it or not, your website is ranked on them somewhere. It may not be high – but therein lies some of the potential value of considering this metric a key performance indicator.
Tracking your position on the SERPs (even in a limited fashion) can give you valuable insight into what people search for online as it pertains to your business. When you can see what people are looking for and how Google ranks you, you can better adjust your site through its structure, technical elements and content.
In time, these efforts are meant to provide a boost to your rankings on search engines, and thus attract more traffic. The key place to start is to assess what you rank for, which means measuring up your SERPs ranks via a tracking service. Many offer basic packages that can give you the essentials you need to get started.
KPI #4: ROI
The beauty of digital marketing is that you can use all of your data to find out exactly how much money you make from your efforts – your return on investment. Acquiring this number requires tracking your data accurately and doing a few calculations, just as with conversion rates. The end result is a clear picture of your digital marketing success though – so it’s worth it.
Here are the variables you need to know:
- Net Profit: If you can collect conversions and know the value of each conversion, net profit follows. You simply multiply a page’s conversions by the monetary value, and you have your net profit. For instance, 10 conversions x $5 profit per conversion = $50 net profit.
- Cost of Investment: You will likely pay for marketing these days, be it an ad on Facebook, copywriting for a blog post or managing social media posts. Track these numbers accurately to help you see if you are truly profiting.
Once you have this data, you can calculate ROI using the formula: (Net Profit – Cost of Investment / Cost of Investment) x 100 = ROI
Continuing the example from above, if you made a $50 profit from marketing and only spent $20 to acquire those customers, that would come to an ROI of (50-20/20) x 100 = 150 percent.
The goal is to make a positive ROI through your marketing, and to grow it over time as you improve your efforts through solid data.
It’s hard to whittle the list of KPIs down, but the four above will help you determine the overall health of your marketing efforts. There are plenty of other data points to track – some better and some worse. At the end of the day, most of the data you seek out will simply be informing or clarifying the KPIs I’ve just discussed.
Consider this information as an introduction to the basics. Diving deeper into these arenas can open up worlds of information on how to better reach your customers – and you’d be surprised just how much they can lead to growth… both this year and beyond.
