Implementing digital signage solutions, unfortunately, isn’t as easy as putting content on your screens and hoping for the best. To fully maximize this technology and generate results, you need a solid strategy — one that involves curating the right content, communicating a strong and impactful message, and later, measuring your digital signage’s performance.
That’s where digital signage key performance indicators (KPIs) come in. Identifying your KPIs and tracking your progress is a crucial part of your digital signage strategy that helps you determine your success, identify loopholes, and make improvements as necessary.
What are Digital Signage KPIs?
KPI stands for “key performance indicator.” It’s a metric that measures the performance of an activity your organization engages in and tracks your progress toward your goals and objectives. KPIs for digital signage tell you how well your strategy or campaign is performing and give you insights into your strengths and weaknesses.
Harnessing digital signage KPIs allows you to gain valuable information about your campaign and its errors and shortcomings. Ultimately, this helps you make data-driven decisions to optimize your digital signage’s performance.
Defining KPIs with the S.M.A.R.T Method 
There’s one proven method to identify good KPIs and check the accuracy and relevance of your selected indicators. It’s called the S.M.A.R.T. approach, which stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-bound.
Specific
For a KPI to be specific, it needs to be directly related to the process. For example, a specific KPI for digital signage would be the percentage of repeat buyers for an ad shown on screen.
Measurable
A KPI should be measurable, i.e. you are able to quantify it in any unit, whether time, quantity, or percentage. This gives you an exact measurement that you can use to evaluate and analyze the value of your KPI and define it.
Achievable
An achievable KPI is one whose value you can reach in the normal course of the process. It should allow you to collect primary information and make calculations. Achievability also concerns the availability of measurements and necessary tools.
Realistic
For a KPI to be realistic or reasonable, it should be relevant and appropriate to the process in question and reflect the course of activities.
Time-bound
To meet this criteria, you have to define a specific period of time to measure your target achievement. Whether you choose a monthly or quarterly periodical measurement, this will allow you to get a picture of the effectiveness of the process and measure the value of your KPI.
KPIs in Digital Signage 
There are several KPIs that you can measure to determine the performance of your digital signage campaign. But before you choose your performance metrics, you have to first identify your digital signage goals and objectives.
The S.M.A.R.T. KPIs will depend on what your digital signage is used for, who your audience is, and what your parameters are. Here are some approaches.
Customer-focused Performance Measurement
If your digital signage is customer-facing and used for purposes of brand awareness, advertising, etc., you should take a customer-focused approach to measuring your digital signage campaign’s performance.
This method looks into aspects like network development, customer loyalty, visitor flows, etc., depending on your objectives. If your goal is to increase your social media following, for example, and your digital signage is designed to do just that, your follower increase or online engagements can be measurable and valuable interactions that signify your campaign is working.
Revenue-oriented Performance Measurement
If your ultimate goal for your digital signage is to increase revenue, you should be looking at revenue-oriented KPIs. These can include:
- Increase in average sales within a specified period of time
- Increase in sales of specific products or product groups
- The relationship between the number of visitors to sales
Revenue-oriented digital signage requires content that is geared toward boosting your company’s bottom line. Your content will likely comprise product adverts, promos, discounts, sales events, and the like.
Performance Measurement through Tests
While determining your KPIs is crucial to assessing your digital signage’s effectiveness, the most important aspect in all of this is adaptability. Digital signage, with its flexible and versatile application, provides you with the perfect opportunity to conduct tests and come up with new forms of advertising, which ultimately creates space for new KPIs.
You should maximize your digital sales board by experimenting with new content, new designs, new messages, etc., and assess how effective each variation is in driving sales or traffic. Then, you can determine which ad content has the most views and longer dwell times, data that can help you choose and curate the perfect content to achieve your goals.
An A/B test, also called a split test, involves evaluating different variants of your advertisement, from the message to the design. Using your digital signage, you can deploy different types of content with slight variations in messaging, construction, design, or media. Data gathered from this test will allow you to determine which content type works best.
Displaying KPIs as Content on Your Digital Signage
While KPIs are usually used for internal assessment, reporting, and decision-making, there are some cases wherein displaying your KPIs on screen can be valuable. This is especially true for employee-facing digital signage that communicates to staff and team members.
By keeping them informed of the company’s goals and progress towards achieving them, you can boost employee engagement, focus, productivity, and accountability. Here are some ways to use KPIs as digital signage content.
Customer Effort Score
The customer effort score (CES) is a metric that shows how much effort a customer needs to exert to use a company’s products. This is a very important KPI for businesses to keep track of. Research conducted by Harvard Business Review found that 94% of customers who exert little effort to use a product have a higher likelihood of supporting the company and making a repeat purchase.
Showing this KPI to your employees will help you breed new ideas for increasing your products’ ease of use, whether it’s a slight design change from your engineering department or the curation of a use guide from your marketing team.
Upsell and Cross-sell Rate
Upselling is the act of increasing the value of a sale by offering customers a more expensive option for the same product. Cross-selling, on the other hand, recommends similar products to customers that can complement or improve the value of their purchase.
Upsell and cross-sell rates are KPIs that allow you to determine if your customers find your products valuable. When visible to your sales team, these metrics can increase their efficiency and encourage them to level up their upselling and cross-selling strategies.
Common Issues
Grouping the common issues your customers face with your products or services can help you identify areas that need improvement. Showing this KPI to your team can assist in product improvement and customer service representation, among others, generating solutions that will improve the customer experience.
Time to Value
The Time to Value KPI is a measurement of the amount of time your customers spend before they get value from your product or service. A shorter time to value increases the chance of repeat purchases. This KPI can serve as an eye-opener for your team, encouraging them to improve customer service or make other strides to provide more value to your customers.
Product Stickiness
Product stickiness measures the frequency of your customers using your product, typically determined by dividing the number of daily active users by the monthly active users. A higher product stickiness value indicates a good-performing product.
This KPI can be valuable for your employees, giving them insights on how to improve product stickiness. For example, it can give your marketing team the idea to create tips and tutorials for using the product.
Leverage Digital Signage KPI to Achieve Your Goals
To fully maximize your use of free digital signage, it’s not enough to just set it and forget it. Measuring your KPIs is a valuable step to determine the effectiveness of your strategies and make decisions to optimize your displays for success.
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