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 quantifying performance.

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

Tracking key metrics helps marketing teams measure their performance against their goals. By doing so, you can get a better understanding of your marketing performance versus 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 key performance data points that marketers use to monitor, record, and measure the progress of marketing plans and campaigns over a period of time. They are used to regularly track to measure success and gauge whether goals are being met.

Why Is It Important to Measure Marketing Metrics?

With the internet, marketing has become more complex. Web users typically follow a long journey online and can arrive on your website through one of many channels or platforms.

At the same time, many platforms provide valuable data that report on user behavior and marketing performance. With these insights, marketers can measure the performance of a channel, platform, or campaign.

There are several reasons why marketing metrics are important to track:

Informed decision-making

Marketers use their metrics to look at data and make decisions about the campaigns or channels. By tracking the performance of campaigns and channels, marketing leaders can make decisions to change their strategy or allocate the amount spent.

Return on investment (ROI)

Metrics can determine which channel, campaign, or platform yields the best marketing return on investment (MROI). Marketers can track the performance of their plans, campaigns, and channel and make updates as needed.

Budget allocation

Marketing leaders should use their metrics to determine the budget needed for each fiscal year. It’s important to get ahead of this matter before your finance team creates one for you. If you’re looking for ways to determine an appropriate budget, check out this new Operational Marketing Funnel Builder and download your metrics This will help justify your budget while working with the CFO and finance team.

Future marketing planning

Data from past and present marketing plans or campaigns can help plan for the future. With your metrics, marketers can evaluate past performance to help create an informed marketing plan.

Provide business value

Ultimately, these metrics help marketers provide value to the organization they are promoting. When presenting marketing results to your CEO or board members, the use of marketing metrics helps them prove their value in terms of business impact.

 

16 Key Marketing Metrics to Track in 2023

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

• Brand Awareness Metrics
  • Impressions
  • First-page keyword rankings
  • Social media engagement metrics

• Pipeline Metrics
  1. Second stage meetings
  2. Sales qualified leads
  3. Deals closed from marketing
  4. Pipeline progression

   

• Conversions Metrics
  • Conversion rate
  • Value per visit
  • Marketing qualified leads

   

• Marketing Performance Metrics
  • Cost per lead
  • Marketing ROI
  • CLV/CAC ratio

• Retention Metrics
  • Customer churn
  • Customer LTV
  • Net promoter score (NPS)

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 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. When 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.

 

Social media engagement

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 marketers should track regularly.

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

Second-stage meetings

Second-stage meetings are meetings with sales leads past the initial qualification stage. For 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 marketing 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 in generating leads that meet the qualifications to become a customer – if you’re driving leads that are not qualified, it’s just wasting your budget.

Deals closed from marketing

This is another key pipeline metric that marketing teams should track. 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 your marketing plan’s effectiveness 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 marketing 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” set in Google Analytics. A few common examples of an online conversion could be a 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 to track 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 your marketing plan’s effectiveness. These key marketing metrics are a great check of the financial health of a business regarding 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 to acquire a lead. This is another important marketing metric 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 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 worth to your business. When combined, the CLV/CAC ratio is an important marketing metric for business performance.

Retention Metrics

Finally, the last metric marketing leaders should track is retention metrics. Customer retention can be an under-utilized area of focus. It costs more to acquire a new customer than to retain existing customers. Revenue 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. This is critical for subscription-based businesses (for example, SaaS companies), as reducing churn means more predictable revenue.

Customer LTV (customer lifetime value)

Customer lifetime value looks at the revenue from a single customer account over the entire customer lifespan. It is another important marketing metric that measures customer retention. Focusing on Customer LTV as a metric is important because it helps companies focus on targeting ideal customers and reducing customer acquisition costs.

Image credit: getthematic.com

Net promoter score (NPS)

Simply put, 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 indicates growth. Measuring NPS is a key metric that focuses on customer satisfaction to improve retention.

In Closing: Marketing Metrics

Tracking key 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 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.