Metric and KPI for Cosmetic Digital Marketing. How to choose the most effective ones?

What are the most useful metrics of your cosmetics company? Sometimes it’s not easy to identify the metrics that will make your cosmetics business effective.

But let us focus on one thing: what makes a metric, i.e. measuring parameters, effective? What are the effective measuring characteristics? More on indicators that drive decisions is gathered in the topic measurable marketing.

To understand if a metric is effective there is a Golden Rule:

A metric to be a good metric for you, and therefore effective must:

• Change your attitudes and/or
• Change your behaviour

If a metric alternately changes your attitudes or behaviors or both.

Within this Webinar we analyze which are the most effective metrics to make effective decisions.

We’ll explain what they are and what meaning they have for cosmetics:

• comparative metrics
• Leading Metrics
• Lagging Metrics

We will explore how to use metrics to make disruptive innovation within cosmetic companies.

I have been speaking about these metrics on stage for years

Choosing the right metrics is not a topic I discovered for this webinar. It is one of the themes I have brought most often to public events, in talks, panels and workshops: from the Social Media Week in Turin in 2012, on integrated communication on social networks, to the Social Media Week in Rome in 2016, where I spoke about the role of social media monitoring in the cosmetics industry.

One of these talks was entirely devoted to the question behind this article: the workshop I led at the Social Case History Forum 2016 in Milan, titled Measure your effectiveness in social campaigns by avoiding Vanity Metrics (#SCHF16). Its core ideas are still the ones I use today with cosmetics and luxury brands.

Vanity metrics versus metrics that drive decisions

Vanity metrics are the numbers that look good in a report but are of no use for your goals. Working with them leaves you in doubt about which decisions to make, when to make them and how, and it takes away the operational picture you need to steer your choices and your strategy.

In the workshop I proposed a clear path to get out of that trap:

• Start from the needs of your consumer communities. Before choosing what to measure, understand what your customers and prospects are actually expressing in their conversations.
• Identify the metrics best suited to making decisions. A metric earns its place only if it tells you what to do next.
• Find and eliminate the metrics that do not serve your goals. Removing a number from a dashboard is often as valuable as adding one.
• Apply the golden rule in a few moves. It is the same rule described above: if a metric does not change your attitudes or your behaviour, for you it is a vanity metric, however impressive it looks.
• Test it on real cases. We went through the main types of metrics with examples from e-commerce marketing and from the luxury and cosmetics sector.

That is why I insist on this point with every cosmetics company I work with: the question is never how many numbers you can collect, but which few numbers can change your next decision.