When it comes to picking KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators) that you will measure your campaign against, many marketers give all their attention to:
- Sales revenue
- Cost per acquisition
- Leads
But there are other KPIs you should be using to ensure that you execute a more successful marketing strategy as well as helping you to identify which campaigns and tactics are having the biggest impact for your business.
No one wants to run marketing activity that's losing money. By tracking these KPIs, you will be able to make the right adjustments to your marketing strategies and budgets.
The most important marketing KPIs you should track:
- Marketing revenue attribution
- Customer acquisition cost (CAC)
- Customer lifetime value (LTV)
- Digital marketing ROI (Return on Investment)
- Traffic-to-lead rate
- Lead-to-customer rate
- Landing page conversion rates
- Organic traffic and top entry pages
- Social media traffic and conversion rates
- Mobile traffic, leads, and conversion rates
1. Marketing revenue attribution
How much revenue have your digital marketing campaigns generated? How much of it comes from your content marketing?
Understanding how much revenue can be attributed to each of your campaigns is important in knowing how effective they are. No one wants to spend money on something that isn't generating a return for the business.
There are multiple models you can use to track revenue attribution. Single-touch attribution models that look at your first or last interaction, or multi-touch attribution models that divide credit over each touchpoint that the customer came through. Although the latter is much harder to track it gives you great insight as to where people are being picked up along the conversion funnel.
With marketing revenue attribution, you’re looking past the number of leads you closed to how much of your revenue was driven by your marketing campaigns. This information is a great way for you to show the value of your marketing efforts.
2. Customer acquisition cost (CAC)
Customer acquisition cost looks at the total cost needed to gain a new customer. This includes all program and marketing costs, salaries, commissions, technology, software, and any overhead associated in turning a lead into a customer.
When calculating CAC, you will also need to determine the time frame in which you’re going to evaluate the cost. This can be done over weeks, months or even years.
Once you’ve narrowed down your time frame, use the examples below to help calculate your total costs associated with digital and outbound marketing.
What’s included in calculating CAC for digital marketing:
- Manpower (sales, creative, and technical)
- Technology and software such as HubSpot, Ahrefs, SEMrush, etc
- General overhead
What’s included in calculating CAC for outbound marketing:
- Advertising spend
- Marketing distribution
- Manpower (sales and marketing)
- General overhead
By calculating the costs associated with your digital and outbound marketing campaigns, you can directly account for new sales, and develop a better understanding of where sales come from.
Some ways you can improve your customer acquisition costs is by working on activities that can improve your conversion rates.
3. Customer lifetime value (LTV)
Customer lifetime value is an estimate of how much a business can expect to make over the average lifespan of a single customer.
Luckily LTV is something that quite often can easily be increased by developing lead nurturing campaigns that reach out to existing customers. This can provide you and your sales team the opportunity to inform existing customers about new services, products, and resources.
4. Digital marketing ROI (Return on Investment)
Every business wants to see something in return for their investment.
Calculating your digital marketing return on investment is crucial in assessing your performance.
Also important is the ability to start planning strategies and budgets for upcoming campaigns. You don't want to continue increasing your budget for a marketing activity that is losing money.
5. Traffic-to-lead ratio (new contact rate)
Understanding your website traffic and knowing where it is coming from, is extremely important, whether it's organic, direct, social media, or referrals.
If your traffic is steady or increasing, but your traffic-to-lead ratio is low or decreasing, that's a sure-fire sign that something is missing on-page. There could be a few culprits, but the biggest is misalignment between what users thought they were clicking on and the information they were shown on the website. You might also be showing them content they aren’t yet ready for, or you simply didn’t answer their question, leaving them to find another website that does.
Before optimizing your content, it’s important to identify what pages have the highest bounce rate and the lowest view-to-contact or view-to-lead rate. This will help you identify which pages need work first.
Another tool you might want to consider adding to your marketing report are heatmaps, especially on your landing pages. Heatmap tools like HotJar are incredibly useful to see what people are doing on your website. It will be helpful in determining if viewers are actually scrolling all the way through your content, and if not perhaps you can work out why?
Regularly tracking your traffic to lead ratio can help determine when it might be time to change your website page copy, design, CTA, etc.
6. Lead-to-customer ratio
It’s important to know how many leads your sales team can close. You’ll want to calculate both your sales qualified lead (SQL) conversion rate and sales accepted lead conversion rate.
What's the difference?
Sales qualified leads (SQLs) are leads considered to be sales ready based on their lead score or specific activities/triggers. Most companies would consider someone that fills out a form to be a lead who is ready to buy your service or product.
Sales accepted leads are simply leads your sales team considers good opportunities and have either contacted them directly or scheduled a call.
Note: It’s possible for someone to be both types of lead.
Looking at your lead-to-customer rate for sales qualified and sales accepted leads, ask yourself the following questions:
- Is my campaign capturing leads?
- Is our CRM successfully passing qualified leads to sales at the right time?
- Do we have a high close rate?
If the answer to these questions is no, talk to your sales team to determine what is missing and how you can work to improve your numbers.
7. Landing page conversion rates
A landing page that doesn't generate leads is pointless, no matter how much traffic it gets or how well designed it is.
If your landing page is getting lots of traffic but has a low conversion rate, this is a red flag that something on your site needs to change.
Try A/B testing some of the things below to see which are delivering the highest conversion rate:
- Change your CTA colour
- Convey more value in your CTA text
- Make your written content more persuasive
- Shorten your form
- Add social proof (i.e., reviews, social counts, awards, etc.)
8. Organic traffic and your top entry pages
The goal of any business using digital marketing is to have most of its website traffic come from organic search.
High organic traffic means people are finding your website through their own research.
Organic traffic is correlated to your SEO strategy. Make sure you monitor this number along with your keywords and refine your strategy accordingly.
While each page should have a targeted keyword, you also want to make sure that your content is optimized for SEO and answering the question your prospects are likely to be asking.
Look at the top landing pages and blog posts that is bringing traffic to your website. Those pages are the first view visitors are going to have of your company and website. You should know what those pages are and should be regularly making sure those pages optimized for conversions and kept up to date.
9. Social media traffic (and conversion rates)
Social media platforms are great for educating your audience and building awareness.
Metrics you can use to show the impact of social media on your marketing efforts include:
- Number of lead conversions generated via each social media channel
- Number of customer conversions generated through each social media channel
- Percentage of traffic associated with social media channels
You might not have time to effectively utilize every platform but breaking them down by the number of leads, customers, and percentage of traffic coming from each will help you determine where to focus your efforts.
10. Mobile traffic, leads, and conversion rates
Is your website optimized for mobile devices?
Pay close attention to:
- Mobile traffic
- Number of lead conversions from mobile devices
- Bounce rates from mobile devices
- Conversion rates from mobile-optimized landing pages
- Popular mobile devices
Understanding what visitors are doing on your website on mobile devices will help you improve the experience, allowing you to optimize it to increase conversions on mobile.
