- in Tips by Bobby Owsinski
Measure Your Record Release Campaign With These Key Performance Indicators
So you have a new recording and you want to drop it on the public. You have an idea of how to do that, right? Far too many artists just record their song and album then wonder what to do with it after it’s done. Assuming that you’re smarter than that, you’ve put together a strategy for how it will be rolled out to the public – a campaign. Your music is on the streaming services and YouTube and you’re talking it up on social, and maybe even lucky enough to get some airplay – but how do you know if it’s working or not? That’s where something called Key Performance Indicators (or KPIs) come into play.
In a great post, Amber Hornsburgh goes into the KPI metrics in detail, but I’ll give you a brief overview here. These are broken down into 4 categories. Some of them might apply to your campaign (like Marketing and Sales) while others (like Radio or Press) might not.
Marketing And Sales KPIs
1) ROI
Return on Investment. Dollar amount you needed to spend to yield a result, which can be a positive or negative value.
2) Playlist Reach
Total number of followers from each playlist a track appears on. Usually represented individually by each DSP.
3) Playlist Real Estate
Visibility of a track on DSPs as shown by the weekly change in number of playlists a track is added or removed from, playlist position.
4) Monthly listeners
Unique listeners of an artist in a 28 day period.
5) Profile Followers (DSP)
Unique followers of an artist’s profile.
6) Consumption
Total sales earned from physical sales (CD, cassette, vinyl), digital downloads, streams, and monetized video views.
7) Territory Growth
Difference in consumption in a specific country, region or set of cities.
8) Revenue
Total money made by an artist over a period of time.
9) Chart Performance
Ranking of the top played, streamed, watched or sold tracks and albums in a given period as reported by Nielsen SoundScan.
Digital And Social KPIs
10) Return on Digital Spend
Dollars generated from specific paid social and digital media buys vs. cost of creating the asset.
11) Cost per New Listener
The dollar value of a new listener as determined by the costs of creative assets, media spend and online publicity.
12) Buzz
The total number of times an artist or record is mentioned across social media platforms, tracked weekly to determine the growth/decline.
13) Follower Growth
The difference in profile followers week on week across social media and DSPs.
14) Click Through Rate
Percentage of ad impressions from an individual asset or campaign that generated a click.
15) Video Completion Length
Average length of completion in time (minutes, seconds) of your video.
16) Efficient Reach
The ratio of paid to earned media.
17) Engagement Rate
Percentage of impressions that drove consumers to actually interact with your asset — usually applied to social media campaigns as a proxy for fan loyalty.
Press KPIs
18) Potential Reach
Total viewership for publication, websites and blogs your coverage is featured.
19) Active Coverage
Coverage secured by the PR team.
20) Pitch Performance
The number of press releases and pitches you are sending out and how they are performing.
21) Sentiment
Tone of the articles mentioning your name, release or competitors.
Radio KPIs
22) Audience
Sum total of listeners to specific radio stations the track is played on.
23) Spins
Number of times an individual track is played on a specific radio station.
The whole idea is to check out these key performance indicators and see how they’re trending. Obviously we want them to trend up, but even if they go down the data can still be meaningful in that it tells us there’s something wrong that perhaps can be corrected. You might want to check out the original article for more details on each KPI.
[Image by Dirk Wouters from Pixabay]
