Designing an effective marketing plan for your dispensary requires something more than just a strategy, it requires tracking and monitoring the progress of your initiatives. Most businesses often measure success strictly by looking at incoming sales, but there’s another factor to consider: cannabis dispensary KPIs, or key performance indicators. You are about to learn why measuring success by income alone is a common mistake, and how to look at the bigger picture with all of your key performance indicators.
The following are signs you want to monitor in your dispensaries marketing plan – We are breaking down 53+ KPIs into seven main categories: website, Google, social media, paid, email, reputation, and finance. And in this article, we’re looking specifically how these are important as cannabis dispensary KPIs.
Website
Unique Site Visits: How many potential customers are discovering your dispensary website for the first time? By increasing your unique visits, you are increasing your brand visibility and growing your potential customer base.
Organic Traffic: We’ve stressed the importance of optimizing your SEO strategy for this reason – organic traffic. Your organic traffic is users who find their way to your website through unpaid search results.
Mobile Traffic: Is your website optimized for your customer’s mobile device? We’ve taught you how to do this in our mobile optimization guide. 50% of mobile visits convert to in-store visits, so it’s important to track this metric for your dispensary.
Local Keyword Rankings: We’ve spoken in-depth about how important it is to dial in your keyword research and specifically how to do so for local search. If optimized correctly, your dispensary site will rank high organically on user search results leading to more impressions and therefore, more visitors to your website.
Track the following:
- Branded: If people are searching for your dispensary specifically by name, are they finding you?
- Local: If a user searches for a dispensary in your city, how are you ranking?
- Nearby: A user will type in ‘dispensary near me’ – How do you rank on your geo-targeted keywords?
Conversions: Conversions are a critical metric to track for your dispensary. You not only want to follow leads, but you also want to track how well your leads are turning into customers.
Track the following:
- Phone Calls: Implement and track your click-to-call button.
- Requests for Driving Directions: Implement and track a link for directions to your dispensary storefront.
- ‘Contact Us’ Form Fills: How many new leads are you capturing? What is the quality of these new leads?
- Menu Visits: How many user visits have viewed your dispensary menu?
- Deals Visits: How many users have seen your dispensary sales page? Are they converting into online sales?
- Online Sales: If applicable, what is your conversion rate for sales from your website?
Requests for Driving Directions: Requests for driving directions are often from activated consumers. By tracking this metric, you are determining how well your listing is educating and enticing your potential customer.
Phone Calls: How many incoming phone calls are you gaining from Google search results? Phone calls help you measure your listing optimization.
Photo Views: Photo views are a measure of user engagement. How many clicks versus views are you getting and are they pursuing additional information? You may need to optimize your listing with Google further.
Total Traffic from Google My Business: Once you’ve created your Google My Business listing, you’ll want to measure the success of your local SEO campaigns to determine achieved visibility in search results.
Social Media
Engagement: Measuring your engagement – likes, shares, comments, views – on your social media content will help you better understand your customer.
Impressions: How many people are your social media campaigns reaching? How relevant is your content to your target customer?
Total Followers: Tracking your total followers allows you to measure growth and reach achieved from your marketing campaigns.
Total Traffic from Social Media: Are you taking full advantage of your social media platforms and gaining inbound traffic from your online presence?
Klout Score: Your Klout Score measures your influence on the online community by combining the analytics from all your social platforms.
Paid
Cost Per Click (CPC): Your CPC estimates the cost of your marketing campaigns. Your paid advertising are hard expenses, and you’ll want to track your ROI on your efforts.
Click Through Rate (CTR): Your CTR measures the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. Are you still profiting
Total Subscribers: Is your email customer base growing? Email is still considered a very effective marketing platform, and its growth should be taken into consideration when measuring your success.
Reputation
Total Reviews: The number of reviews you have are a measure of your engagement with your customers and lend to your online visibility and reputation.
Total Directory Views: After you’ve optimized your online business listings and invested in a high-ranking cannabis directory listings, you’ll want to track your success with each.
- Leafly
- Yelp
- Weedmaps
Average Rating: Review the consumer platforms and measure your online reputation with your customers. Average rating is a very influential factor in bringing in new customers so invest in making improvements where necessary.
Finance
Cost per Acquisition: What is the hard cost for you to acquire each new customer for your dispensary?
Sales Revenue: Your gross sales are important, yes, but remember what we said above that they are only a part of the bigger picture.
Gross Margin (GM): As a retailer, you should know this metric as well as it ultimately indicates how much
Cost per Lead: How much is a potential customer costing you? Whether it’s a contact form or an email subscriber, what is the average cost to capture a lead?
Customer Value: This metric is a compilation of various metrics – How much is your client spending on average? How many transactions are they performing annually? This indicator will help you better understand the value of your customer.
Digital Marketing/ Inbound Marketing ROI: To measure the success of your digital marketing campaigns, you need to analyze your return on investment. Is what you’re getting – a click, an email, an in-store visit, purchase – worth the costs you are spending on the campaign.
Percentage of Sales from Digital: Measuring your percentage of sales from your digital marketing campaigns is going to give you insight on how well your team is performing. Are you efficiently using the marketing channels? What can sales from your dispensary storefront and online store be attributed directly to your digital marketing efforts?
Traffic to Lead Ratio: If you have a landing page or product page that is getting lots of traffic, but not converting – You’ve found a weakness in your campaign. You need to optimize for conversions.
Profit and Loss Statement: Don’t overlook this KPI – It can help you identify better pricing strategies and manage expenses efficiently.
Sales Per Square Foot: This KPI measures the effectiveness of your store layout and the performance of your sales staff and budtenders. If you have multiple dispensaries, you can compare this KPI across multiple stores.
Average Customer Spend: By analyzing your customer’s shopping patterns, you can work towards honing in your sales strategy and possible up-sell opportunities to increase customer spend.
Transactions per Customer Annually: How many times a year are they making purchases? This indicator will help you further dial in the lifetime value of your client.
Stock Turnover Rate: How many times, on average, is your inventory of a given product sold annually? Being able to forecast how quickly you can sell through your inventory will extremely valuable to your retail business.
Sell-Through Rate: This KPI is the ratio of the number of units sold to the number of units on-hand at the beginning of a period. The sell-through rate is important when making decisions on stocking seasonal merchandise because you’ll want to move through that inventory before the season ends.
Year Over Year Percentage Change in Sales % and $: Although this is considered a high-level metric, a change in this rate can lead you to discover trends and inefficiencies in your dispensary.
Shopper Value: How much is your visitor worth when they enter your retail store? Paid this value with your conversion rate and you’ll be able to forecast how much your business can grow as your further increase your conversion rate.
Sales by Category: Which group of products is doing best in your dispensary? Edibles, concentrates, flower, sativa, indica, drinks, CBD, pre-rolls, vape cartridges, etc. Your goal is to identify which product types are performing best so you can increase your inventory of those products while decreasing your inventory on categories that are not doing well.
Total Units per Transaction: A majority of your revenue will come from the second product your customer buys. By tracking this KPI, you can measure the performance of your sales team and better strategize on signage and counter displays to upsell your customers.