Staying one step ahead of the competition is crucial for business success in all industries, and telecommunications is not an exception. Here are the key KPIs telecoms should closely monitor to make sure they remain competitive in today’s market.
Competition is fierce in the telecommunication sector, so it’s essential for telecoms all around the world to gain any advantage they can. The best way to achieve and retain market leadership is to closely monitor a range of KPIs covering an area spanning from marketing campaign effectiveness, through customer satisfaction, to network performance.
By closely monitoring these KPIs, decision-makers at telecoms can make better, data-driven decisions and help the company to lead in the marketplace. Here are 12 selected KPIs that marketers and business decision-makers should be monitoring and sharing across the business to make timely decisions based on quality data, and secure growth.
Campaign Success
1. Clicks
Measuring how many customers click on a CTA on a particular web page, an email link or a digital ad is still one of the best ways to get an idea of how successful a marketing campaign is. It’s a simple metric, but by measuring clicks you can get a sense of how well an ad is doing in appealing to people who see it because they’re willing to act on the information they’ve seen and want to find out more.
2. Impressions
Impressions refers to how often your advert has been shown on a particular platform, channel, or advertising network. Clicks, coupled with impressions, can give you a more rounded picture of your campaign efficiency, particularly since you are competing with other businesses for ad placement.
3. Click-through Rate (CTR)
The CTR is a KPI related to both Clicks and Impressions, translating Clicks into trends, rather than leaving them as aggregate numbers. You calculate the CTR by dividing the total number of Clicks your ad gets by the total number of Impressions, to generate a percentage. This enables you to discover high - or low-performing ads that require more or less budget.
4. Conversions
Conversions build on Clicks and CTRs, requiring users to act once they’ve interacted with your ad, so this is a KPI worth tracking. For example, after the user has clicked on your ad, or watched your video, a conversion requires them to go one step further and click through to your website, sign up to a newsletter, or complete an online purchase.
Tracking Your Costs
5. Average Cost per Click
As well as measuring the success of your marketing activities, it’s important to use KPIs that give you an insight into your campaign costs. Average Cost per Click is one of these. Cost-per-click pricing, sometimes known as pay-per-click (PPC), is calculated by dividing the cost of your clicks by the total number of clicks your campaign received. By monitoring this over time, you can begin to understand hourly, daily, weekly and seasonal trends, in order to address them and optimize your ads, ad groups, and campaigns.
6. Cost per Conversion (CPC)
Another KPI metric worth watching is Cost per Conversion (CPC) - ad spend divided by the number of conversions it generates. Using a visualization tool like Adverity, this metric can quickly show you which campaigns look on track, and which ones don’t; in other words, which ones are taking too much of your ad spend and not giving you an adequate return. This can prompt you to optimize individual elements, such as copy, messaging, graphics, or CTAs, to get the best impact.
7. Subscriber Acquisition Cost
An essential KPI for telcos, SAC represents the true cost of gaining a new customer. It includes money spent on marketing, advertising, and commission, as well as customer onboarding expenses, and the costs of putting users onto the network. Because it can be such a complex calculation, some telecoms firms are applying machine learning and AI to their analytics strategy to get a more comprehensive view of SAC.
Customer satisfaction
8. Customer Churn
Measuring churn is a top priority for telecoms marketers and business leaders, as the industry as a whole suffers from high levels of customer movement. By monitoring churn for particular packages, bundles and price points, broadband speeds, or handset types, you can get an insight into how satisfied customers are with particular offerings, and how many might be leaving because of them.
(Check out our blog post on how big data analytics holds the key to reducing customer churn for Telecoms companies)
9. Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Another measurement of customer satisfaction is the Net Promoter Score, a key metric for wireline and mobile network operators to gauge the health of their customer relationships. This KPI is calculated based on responses to the question ‘how likely are you to recommend our company, product, or service to a friend or colleague?’, with the score varying from 0 to 10.
10. Average Return per User (ARPU)
Although it isn’t a precise indicator of customer satisfaction, your ARPU will tell you how much money the business makes for each person using its service. It is, therefore, a valuable KPI for tracking the financial value of each customer to the business, and a helpful analytics KPI for operators with very large user bases.
Network measurements
11. Network performance
Telecom service firms and MNOs are essentially networking technology service providers. So, IT-centric KPIs that measure the performance of the network are also of interest to marketing, sales, advertising, customer service, and other business units.
All of these can benefit from having access to network-centric KPIs that measure factors such as network availability, accessibility, capacity and utilization, speed, and throughput. They all have a bearing on the customer experience, satisfaction levels, and churn, and can affect the bottom line.
12. Network Operating Cost
Finally, whether the network uses copper, fiber, microwave, or satellite technology for transmission, the network is a telecom company’s crown jewels - and it’s a competitive differentiator. Therefore, one KPI well worth trying to track and visualize is your network operating cost.
Infrastructure is expensive to establish and maintain, and many things can add to its cost, including IT upgrades, app maintenance, security, customer technical support, and so on. Every department has a responsibility to contribute to lowering the overall network operating cost, so it helps if everyone has an understanding of this important metric.
Collaborate and Share
Telecoms are often among the bigger organizations, with multiple departments all generating, monitoring, and analyzing information. Consequently, it’s easy to create independent data silos, particularly if you have legacy databases, or duplicate your analytics efforts with different departmental teams working on similar datasets.
But you can gain a competitive edge if you are able to pull together and unify your data, and enable data sharing and collaboration across the organization – and this is possible with an advanced analytics platform like Adverity.
