How to Keep Your Search Team in Asia Humming With the Right KPIs
As a senior marketer, how do you plan and build team KPIs that could keep the team accountable and motivated while remaining sensitive to the Asian context?
As a senior marketer, how do you plan and build team KPIs that could keep the team accountable and motivated while remaining sensitive to the Asian context?
In businesses that are marketplaces in Asia such as Rakuten.com, Alibaba.com or my company, search is an integral part of how you bring new visitors to your site, so much so that your search people can become the superstars of your marketing team.
SEO (search engine optimization) and PPC (pay-per-click) text ads are the bread and butter of your site’s traffic that can contribute significantly to the goal of bringing new visitors to your site.
Given the importance of this channel, as a senior marketer, how do you plan and build team KPIs that could keep the team accountable and motivated while remaining sensitive to the Asian context?
Here are some ideas for KPIs (key performance indicators) in an Asian marketplace business.
For your PPC colleagues that write those slightly “boring” but highly effective text ads, here are some important things to have in their KPIs:
For your SEO person, KPIs can be harder to write as there are so many dependencies in SEO that it’s difficult to set targets that do not become de-motivational as the year wears on.
This is especially important in Asia where team members often have internal benchmarks about where they stand with regard to relative performance on a regular basis. Your SEO person may be comparing themselves with your PPC colleague and getting quite despondent.
To balance the equation and recognize those dependencies, these performance metrics will focus on getting the SEO governance process 100 percent right even while work may be stuck in the development pipeline:
In addition to all this, we know search can get boring after a while so you need to keep your team interested as part of your retention strategy.
Be a bit different from other employers in Asia and remove the silos. Get the SEO team member to teach the PPC colleague and vice versa. Give them solid cross-disciplinary mini projects to own.
Keep moving them up the skills ladder and you’ll soon see the holy grail of search emerge on the horizon – integrated SEO and PPC strategies.
Yes, that’s correct. Once your PPC and SEO team members know what each other is doing, then cross-pollination will happen naturally. For example, conduct cannibalization studies to see how much your PPC is helping or hurting your SEO and other interesting actionable insights.
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