In a world where digital marketing crosses linguistic and cultural boundaries, it is essential to know how to measure the results of a marketing campaign in order to optimise strategies and maximise investment. However, to get started in digital marketing metrics, you need to be clear that you need reliable data to make good decisions for your company. Key performance indicators, or KPIs, for international marketing are essential tools for this task. But which indexes and indicators should you use? Which are most useful for your goals? In this article, we will look at the metrics you should use to most effectively evaluate your multilingual digital campaigns.

Campaign ROI: the cornerstone

After working on a campaign for some time, it is essential to determine whether it has achieved the expected results. Learning how to measure a marketing campaign’s results and degree of success is key to making well-informed decisions. In that sense, one of the most basic international marketing KPIs is the return on investment (also known as ROI). This is a basic international digital marketing metric, which allows the effectiveness of the campaign to be evaluated in economic terms by comparing the benefit obtained with the cost invested in the campaign. Among other things, ROI analysis helps to identify which elements of a strategy generate the most value and which need to be readjusted or even eliminated altogether.

The calculation of this metric is straightforward, as it is obtained from the following formula:

ROI = (Profit – Investment / Investment)

If the above calculation results in a positive value, the campaign is profitable. Calculating the marketing ROI has many advantages for the company, because it allows, among other things, to optimise economic resources and to take measures based on specific data. It also helps to better identify opportunities for improvement, to achieve better alignment with the company’s objectives and an optimal response to changes in the market.

Reach & brand recognition

Another international marketing KPI that can be useful is campaign reach. This metric measures how many people have seen your campaign at any given time, and therefore helps you to know whether your campaign has the ability to reach a wide audience. Reach allows us to determine the visibility of a multilingual campaign and thus take the necessary measures to reach a larger number of potential customers. The main metric used to measure reach is the number of impressions or percentage of audience reached.

Brand recognition, as the name suggests, refers to the degree of familiarity that the general public has with a brand, i.e. how many of those people are likely to remember or recognise your brand at a later point in time. To this end, it is very important that multilingual campaigns and advertisements mirror the personality and values of a brand. It is also essential to track how many people are able to remember a campaign or advertisement out of all those who have received it. This is known as estimated ad recall lift and is a key digital marketing metric for brand recognition.

Top-of-mind awareness

In line with the previous metric, we must also talk about awareness, or in other words, the degree of visibility and recognition that a brand has among its target audience. When a brand has good brand awareness, people remember it more easily, consumers are more loyal to it, and it increases its credibility and value, which translates into higher sales. And how is all this achieved? Of course, with data, studying the market, the target audience and the company. In that sense, international marketing KPIs are a very useful aid. Once you have gathered all the information, you will be able to develop and implement the necessary strategies to increase your brand awareness.

And, if we talk about awareness, we cannot forget about the top-of-mind position, a digital marketing metric that tells us how likely a brand is to be the first to pop up in consumers’ minds when they think of a certain product category. However, it is important to remember that being on someone’s mind does not imply that they are a consumer of the products or that they have a good opinion of the brand. For example, if you have had a bad experience with an electricity company, that company will probably be the first one you think of when you talk about electricity, but it will not be because of something positive.

When you discover how to measure the results of a marketing campaign, you will be able to understand how much a brand stands out in a highly competitive market.

Conversion funnels: from interest to customer

Conversion funnels are essential to understand how users interact with your multilingual campaigns and at what point they move from being mere viewers to customers. Conversion funnels, also known as sales funnels, set out the five steps that visitors to a website must follow to achieve a goal, for example, registering or making a purchase.  These stages are as follows:

1. Awareness, in which the brand is made known to attract the largest number of users.

2. Interest, in which the aim is to win the audience’s trust and interest.

3. Engagement, in which the aim is to encourage users to spend as much time as possible on the website in order to build user loyalty.

4. Sale, in which the visitor becomes a customer.

5. Loyalty, in which it is sought that customers who already know the brand are satisfied, buy again and recommend it.

The sales funnel is a key digital marketing metric that helps us determine at what point users who visit a website get lost before achieving the objectives we seek to achieve with a website, such as registering or making a sale. Therefore, it helps us shape and optimise the website and the user experience to improve our objectives. Ultimately, it also contributes to improving marketing ROI.  

Measuring the success of your multilingual digital marketing campaigns is a complex but essential process. After all, if we don’t have data on performance, how can we redirect or improve it? With these key digital marketing metrics, you can optimise your international marketing strategy and get a higher return on investment. But remember that you will need to review and adjust your metrics and strategies from time to time based on the data collected to remain relevant in the global market.