Marketing KPIs Part 1: Messaging, Awareness, and Website Metrics

How important are marketing KPI’s for your branded-ingredient business – pure gold, maybe even platinum. Tracking performance, optimizing marketing strategies, and driving marketing campaigns is a roadmap to your companies’ growth. This roadmap helps you track awareness, generate high quality leads for your sales team, expand into new markets, and strengthen your ingredients credibility – all gold. But which KPI’s are the best, which ones REALLY matter in our industry? This blog series focuses on website traffic.

A lot of brands come to me when they are first launching an ingredient and say to me – help me sell, help me generate leads. My response is always the same “marketing 101” – brand awareness. Before you can sell, you need to be recognized in the market. Not only recognized but highly regarded as a credible, science-driven, and a responsible company.  

A well-executed brand awareness strategy will lay the groundwork for long-term success. It is not just about making noise, but it is about positioning your brand effectively and truthfully within the industry.  When I say truthfully – I mean ensuring that every claim you make is substantiated by science and aligned with regulatory compliance. In the dietary supplement industry, we know credibility is everything – if your claims cannot be backed, your brands reputation and business are at risk. 

When starting with marketing messages, claims should be compelling, and they also must be compliant. What does that mean “compliant?”

·       Any structure function claim should be rooted from published research or clinical studies on your ingredient.  Now I say YOUR ingredient, but we borrow research in this industry – and it is OK, be transparent and have a roadmap for your brand’s future research.

·       Avoid misleading language – we all know what it is – just do not use it. Treats, cures, prevents, and so on. Soft claims with scientific backing such as supports or promotes are typically more acceptable in the industry.

·       Claim = Dose – clients come to me and ask what I can say about my product at specific doses? My first question is, do you have studies on those specific doses? If yes, great. If not – claims should reflect the dosage parameters that are conducted in clinical studies.

So how do we quantify awareness and what key metrics should we be tracking?

I LOVE website traffic – it is one of my all-time favorite awareness measurements every company should be implementing. Your website is your storefront, the first place most formulators will go to find out information about your product. Website traffic is not just about getting more visitors, it is about understanding who they are, what they do, and if you can turn them into leads. A well-optimized website with the right traffic and right content will generate high-quality leads for your business. Let’s breakdown the metrics of a website and what you SHOULD be measuring and reporting:

Total Website Visitors: This is a baseline metric--set a target and understand if visitors are increasing over time. Measure what spikes traffic in your website – paid campaign, LI post, trade show, etc.) These spikes are good indicators of what you should be doing more of. Keep track of these spikes and understand the marketing campaigns that they are connected to.

Traffic Sources: Knowing where your traffic comes from helps you optimize your marketing spend through your campaigns. All marketing campaigns should be tagged with a URL back to your site. Where you get your traffic from matters - optimize your paid media campaigns to the places that are generating the most traffic to your site - but make sure it’s the RIGHT traffic.

Organic search refers to those people that are finding your through google--a higher search visibility is directly related to a strong SEO.

Referral traffic could be industry sites that are sharing your website links. Understanding your referral traffic is important - most will come from paid media campaigns or editorial content. Use the cost of your paid media campaign and measure against your traffic. You can get a pretty solid idea of your awareness ROI from each of your media buys by looking at your referral traffic.

Social media traffic is a good indicator if your posts are generating traffic to site - specifically LinkedIn for our industry. Certain industry posts may direct greater traffic than others – measure that and do more of those!

Direct traffic represents those people directly typing in your website URL – a good indicator that the brand is recognized within the industry.

Bounce Rate: Bounce rate gets slightly pushed to the side, but it is one of my favorite website measurements. Bounce rate refers to the percent of people that come to your page and jump off. A high bounce rate indicates the audience coming to your page are not engaged and just leave. This could be due to a few different factors such as, not having the right content on the page, driving the wrong traffic to the page, and having meaningless backlinks.  A low bounce rate indicates the right traffic is present on your page and engaged.  A good goal for bounce rate should be below 40%.

Page Visits: Page visits are a great indicator of which pages are performing the best. Are people downloading white papers or brochures? Or are they spending a fair amount of time reading the science on your ingredients? These are good indicators of where to include new content as well as feature downloadable materials for lead generation.

Website traffic is one of the most valuable marketing KPIs for branded ingredient companies – it is a direct reflection of your brand awareness, credibility, and lead generation potential. Your website services are the first stop for formulators and potential customers to research your ingredient. A well-optimized website, paired with strong SEO, social media efforts, and targeted marketing campaigns, ensures that your brand is visible, your content is compelling, and your ingredient is positioned as a credible, science-backed solution. By consistently measuring and refining these KPIs, you can turn website traffic into a strategic growth engine for your business – pure gold!