16 Key Marketing Metrics That Are Important to Track

The goal of any marketing plan is growth – but how should you measure the effectiveness of your marketing efforts? Tracking and analyzing the right marketing metrics can be key in how you quantify success.

With the shift to digital marketing, data is readily available across many different marketing platforms, tools, and software. This results in an overwhelming amount of marketing metrics to choose from.

Metrics help marketing teams track their performance to ultimately meet their goals. It’s important to track strategic metrics that are meaningful to your business. By doing so, you can get a better understanding of the marketing performance, and in the bigger picture, marketers can explain the effect it has on an organization’s growth to company stakeholders.

What Are Marketing Metrics?

Marketing metrics are performance data points that marketers use to monitor, record, and measure the progress of marketing plans and campaigns over a period of time. Marketing metrics are used to regularly track to measure success and gauge whether goals are being met.

16 Key Marketing Metrics to Track

What are the most important marketing metrics to focus on to accurately measure performance? There are several types of metrics to use to track success. Here’s our list of the key metrics in marketing to track on a continual basis, sorted by metric type:

Brand Awareness Metrics
Pipeline Metrics
Conversions Metrics
Marketing Performance Metrics
Retention Metrics

Brand Awareness Metrics

Awareness metrics measure how familiar your target audience is with your organization. Brand awareness is the first step in the customer buying process. Here is a list of key marketing metrics to use to measure brand awareness.

Impressions
First-page keyword rankings
Social media engagement metrics

Impressions

Impressions are typically used to track digital advertising campaigns on search engines like Google or Bing, as well as social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, or TikTok.

In addition to digital advertising, impressions can be used in organic searches. With Google Search Console, you can see website impressions within a specified period of time. If you’re measuring awareness, impressions are an important metric for measuring performance.

First-page keyword rankings

Organic search can be an important channel for many organizations to increase their online presence. Keyword rankings for a website can be an indicator of SEO performance in Google searches.

Very few users will click beyond the first page of online search results. That’s why the number of keywords ranking on the first page of Google (and other search engines) can be a meaningful metric to track awareness. This data can be found for free using Google Search Console, or by signing up with a monthly payment plan for a tracking tool like Semrush or Moz.

There are several social media platforms for organizations to use as a marketing tool to drive awareness. For certain organizations, some platforms may be more successful than others.

Whatever platforms you use, tracking social engagement metrics is an excellent way to measure awareness in digital marketing. These marketing metrics measure activity when content is posted on social media, which typically includes likes, shares, and comments.

Pipeline Metrics

The next step in your marketing plan is to use campaigns and activities to fill up your pipeline with qualified leads. From there, leads can be converted to customers and bring in revenue. Here is the list of key pipeline metrics to track on a regular basis.

Second stage meetings
Sales qualified leads
Deals closed from marketing
Pipeline progression

Second-stage meetings

Second stage meetings are meetings with sales leads that are past the initial qualification stage. As an example, these leads have already had a demo of our product or an initial meeting with a sales team, and the probability of closing is far more likely. Leads in the second stage meeting are past the qualifications and there is a true opportunity to sell clients or customers, making them a key metric to track.

Sales qualified leads

The definition of sales qualified leads are leads that have a high probability of becoming a customer. Sales qualified leads are seen as a better fit than marketing leads. In terms of marketing metrics, this is a critical one to track, because you’ll know how effective your plan is actually generating leads that meet the qualifications to become a customer – if you’re driving leads that are not qualified, it’s just wasting budget.

Deals closed from marketing

This is another key pipeline metric that should be tracked by marketing teams. Deals closed from marketing mean exactly how it sounds. It tracks the number of deals closed initiated from marketing efforts. This is a great indication of how effective your marketing plan is in targeting the right audience.

Pipeline progression (close rate)

The close rate is the average sales cycle, or in other words, the average length of time it takes to close a deal. This marketing metric measures how efficiently a sales professional or sales team performs to close deals compared to the number of proposals.

Conversion Metrics

Inbound marketing has become a central part of acquiring customers. Measuring website conversion metrics through platforms like Google Analytics can help you better understand digital marketing performance. When users arrive at your website, the ultimate goal is to get them to convert online. Here is a brief list of key metrics that measure conversions:

Conversion rate
Value per visit
Marketing qualified leads

Conversion rate

Tracked in Google Analytics, the conversion rate is a standard marketing metric used to track the rate of users taking the end goal, or a “conversion” that is set in Google Analytics. A few common examples of a conversion could be an online purchase, a form fill, or a download. Conversion rate is an important metric that is key to tracking the performance of digital marketing efforts.

Value per visit

In Google Analytics, you can assign each conversion with a value amount. For example, if you estimate that a form fill demo request lead is worth $500, you can measure the value of each web visit. Value per visit is a key metric that focuses on improving the average value of each visit to the website.

Marketing qualified leads (MQLs)

A Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) is a lead that has indicated an interest in a product or service that a marketing team or professional deems is likely to become a customer. After an initial interaction, an MQL is the next step to converting a lead to a customer. An increase in this metric is a great indication of an increase in overall marketing performance.

Marketing Performance Metrics

Performance metrics are meant to analyze your marketing funnel, by providing a bottom-line view of how effective your marketing plan is. These key marketing metrics are a great check of the financial health of a business in regard to its marketing efforts.

Cost per lead
Marketing ROI
CLV/CAC ratio

Cost per lead (CPL)

Cost per lead (CPL) is a marketing metric that measures how much it costs you to acquire a lead. This is another important marketing metric that is meant to analyze your efforts with a bottom-line view. CPL is calculated by dividing the amount spent on a marketing initiative by the number of leads generated.

Marketing ROI (Business Value)

Whenever you invest in something, you expect to get a good return on the investment – marketing is no different. The marketing return on investment (MROI) is the revenue yielded from the amount allocated to a marketing plan, campaign, or activity. Marketing ROI is calculated by dividing the amount spent on marketing activities by revenue. Learn more about how to accurately measure marketing ROI here.

CLV/CAC ratio

Customer acquisition cost (CAC) and customer lifetime value (CLV) are two marketing metrics that are important to use when measuring performance. Customer acquisition cost tells you how much it costs to acquire a new customer, and customer lifetime value tells you how much a customer is actually worth to your business. When combined, the CLV/CAC ratio is an important marketing metric for business performance.

Retention Metrics

Finally, the last type of marketing metrics tracked are retention metrics. Customer retention can be an under-utilized area of focus. It costs more to acquire a new customer than it does to retain existing customers. Revenue that is generated from existing customers can put less pressure on marketing efforts.

Though retention directly relates to customer service, marketing can play a role. A great way to improve retention metrics is through marketing. Here are some key metrics on customer retention that should be measured and tracked.

Customer churn
Customer LTV
Net promoter score (NPS)

Customer churn

Customer churn is the rate at which customers stop buying from or subscribing to your organization over a certain period of time. For subscription-based businesses (for example, SaaS companies) this is critical, as reducing churn means more predictable revenue.

Customer LTV (customer lifetime value)

Customer lifetime value takes a look at the revenue from a single customer account over the entire customer lifespan. It is another important marketing metric that measures customer retention. The importance of focusing on Customer LTV as a metric is that it helps companies focus on targeting ideal customers, and reducing customer acquisition costs.

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Net promoter score (NPS)

To put it simply, the net promoter score is a scale of 1-10 of how likely a customer would recommend your company to a friend or colleague. This metric is used by marketing teams and organizations to quantify customer loyalty and is an indication of growth. Measuring NPS is a key metric that focuses on the customer satisfaction aspect to improve retention.

In Closing: Marketing Metrics

Tracking the right marketing metrics is important for your business. It’s important to use an array of metrics that measure the performance at each part of the marketing funnel. Use these key metrics in marketing to track your marketing performance.

At Planful, our job is to get your marketing off the ground and perform well (with the aid of our marketing planning software, of course).

Planful’s marketing performance management software helps track these metrics to improve the performance of your marketing plans and campaigns. Learn more about our all-in-one marketing platform, and how it can help your build plans and measure the ROI of efforts.