EMBiz: ROI vs KPI

ROI vs KPI

Laurel Mintz

Hi everyone, I'm Laurel Mintz, CEO and Founder of Elevate My Brand, and this is EMBiz. There is always confusion around the difference between ROI versus KPI. So that's what we're going to talk about today so that you're really clear on how you're tracking your success metrics.

What is ROI?

ROI is your return on investment. This is typically more of a sales KPI or an investment metric that you'd be tracking towards how much you're spending on a company, right? 

What is a KPI?

ROI is very different than a KPI, which is a key performance indicator. Key performance indicator is really used more as a marketing metric that we focus on to see if the work that we're doing having the impact and the conversion at whatever level along the funnel that we wanted to have. So for example, a KPI that we would be tracking for a marketing campaign might be something around impressions reach engagements, clicks or things like driving new traffic to your website at a specific rate. So you don't want to just look at what your KPIs are, you also wanna be very specific on the metric of success or what that looks like for each channel and each stage along the marketing funnel. For example, tracking a 10% increase in site traffic would be a very measurable and calculable KPI to track to make sure that you're gaining new eyeballs to the website and then converting it through something like subscriptions to your newsletter as another KPI. So a lot of these KPIs are connected ultimately, most of this is about ROAS or return on ad spend.

At Elevate My Brand, we focus more on KPIs, not just saying what they are, but making sure we're tracking towards their success.