Understanding the metrics to evaluate the performance of your marketing efforts is crucial to ensuring that your marketing campaigns accomplish their goals. Building a powerful marketing strategy and setting up powerful and effective marketing campaigns is the solution to driving more revenue and whole business growth. In this article, we’ve picked the top 25 marketing KPIs that every business should track to learn and analyze the results of their marketing campaigns.
Top 25 Marketing KPIs to Track
1. Sales growth
There is no wonder that sales growth is regarded as one of the most important KPIs for marketing managers and companies in general. Sales growth is what any business owners aim for, what investors worry about, and what employees work hard. It estimates the rate at which a company has been increasing its revenue from sales over a particular period.
If you are currently not measuring your sales growth, then we suggest you start it now. Not only does it enable the identification of growth trends, but it also enables you to establish and forecast realistic sales and revenue goals.
2. Return on Investment (ROI)
Return on Investment is one of the most significant and tracked marketing KPIs, so you better begin right now if you haven’t tracked it so far. It aids you in figuring out if the amount of money you contribute to marketing activities is worth the amount of money you make in sales.
Having a track of your marketing ROI will make it more comfortable for you to justify marketing budgets, measure marketing efficiency, and ultimately let you plan future marketing strategies.
3. Leads
It’s simple to calculate the value of leads: the more leads you generate, the more sales opportunities you have, and therefore, your sales growth opportunities increase.
The number and the quality of leads are the two most significant marketing KPIs in lead generation. For instance, suppose your business offers SaaS and allows new customers a free trial. In that case, the number of prospects that view or click on your lead magnet will be the number of overall leads you have made, while the number of quality leads is the number of prospects that are likely to become paying customers.
4. Conversion rate
The conversion rate is one of the best marketing KPIs for marketing managers as it shows how effective your marketing campaign is and defines your ROI. It measures the percentage of users who have achieved your desired action, such as making your email subscribers click on a link in your email, leading to a landing page where the subscribers will fill out a lead form.
Another example is the percentage of people who performed the desired action that your PPC ad campaign intended for (making a purchase, submitting a form, registering for your website, etc.).
Simply put, the conversion rate assists you find out how sound your marketing efforts are in making people do what you require them to do. The higher your conversion rate is, the more productive your campaign is.
5. The lifetime value of a customer (LTV)
How much is every customer worth to your business? This marketing KPI covers the total revenue a business can expect to make from a single customer. Of course, the amount you’ll get is approximate, but it will provide you with an idea. It also assists in determining how much to spend on marketing activities and is a wonderful way to strategize future business goals.
6. Customer acquisition cost (CAC)
The customer acquisition cost KPI is an important business metric that refers to the marketing and sales resources required to acquire new customers. It’s usually used alongside the customer lifetime value metric to gauge the value created by a new customer.
7. Open rate
Email open rate is one of the most significant metrics to keep track of. One of the best methods to determine whether your email marketing strategy is acting is by revealing to you the percentage of your audience that opens the emails you are sending them. Some factors can influence your open rates, such as the subject line and the sender’s name.
8. Click-through-rate
Nearly every marketing email intends to get the subscribers to act – click on a link inside the email that usually leads to a landing page where the subscribers can obtain a product or service or direct traffic to your website.
So, when it comes down to estimating the effectiveness of your email marketing strategy, the click-through rate is a metric that email marketers should have their eyes on. It gives the percentage of email recipients who clicked on a link inside your email.
9. Unsubscribe rate
The unsubscribe rate is the percentage of your email subscribers who chose not to get emails from you any longer.
10. Click-to-open rate
The click-to-open rate defines whether your content resonates with your recipients and shows how effective the email campaign compelled the recipient to take action. It estimates the percentage of recipients who opened your email and clicked on the link inside it.
11. Bounce rate
You should aim to have a bounce rate as low as possible. The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors to your website that disappears within a few seconds after landing on it.
If you possess a high bounce rate, that indicates that you’re doing something wrong:
- Your website might load slowly
- Your website might not be simple to navigate
- Your website might display a lot of ads on its pages that put off visitors away
- Your content doesn’t suit the title or the description it has in the SERPs
- Your website is not mobile-friendly
If you have a huge bounce rate, make sure to discover what’s driving visitors away and fix it.
12. Search and keyword ranking
The higher your website ranks for specific keywords, the more traffic you’ll see. The first page of Google results captures between 71-92% of all traffic, while most people usually don’t go to the second page. Therefore, it is necessary to keep track of your search and keyword rankings.
Also, the position of your content in the SERPs right correlates to your SEO efforts and success.
Remember that sometimes your content will rank for your preferred keywords, but sometimes it might rank for keywords different from those you needed to rank for. In both cases, you should observe how your keywords are doing in the search results and how your positions in the search results are growing for the same keywords. You can do this with tools such as Moz, SEMrush, Ahrefs, and many more.
13. CTR of internal links
Internal links are the hyperlinks on a web page to another page on the same website. For instance, a demo page link into a blog article or a contact us page link on the about us page.
So, if your content incorporates internal links to sign up for a free trial, make a purchase, etc., it is necessary to track these pages’ click-through rate (CTR). The higher your CTR of internal links is, the more people you get to begin a free trial or buy your product/service.
14. Time on page
This content marketing KPI is of importance. Receiving tons of traffic is wonderful, but if people don’t stay long enough on your page to view your article or engage with your content, it doesn’t matter how many people are visiting your website.
Tracking visitors’ time on pages is important also because it shows who’s interested in your content, who isn’t, and whether it is useful. For instance, let’s say that you have posted a 5000-word blog article on dieting. Your article might receive 25 000 unique visits. Still, if people only spend 10-20 seconds skimming that article, that shows you that either they are not interested in this topic or that your content isn’t useful and couldn’t take people’s attention.
The second scenario is more likely since people arrived on your page; they must have seen what you wrote about. To enhance your time on page KPI, you should try shortening the article or drafting a new, compelling introduction that will make visitors desire to read the entire blog.
15. Social shares
The more social shares you receive, the more people you’ll reach. Making your content quickly sharable on different social media channels is important. With only a few social shares, your content could go viral, encouraging new leads to your website and increasing your social media follower’s base.
16. Comments
Getting comments on your web pages is a success. Comments show that your content sparks a discussion and engages the readers to respond, and maintains publicity. Even if people give critical comments, embrace them, and accept them as feedback to improve your content and marketing. Don’t forget to reply to these comments, too. If you leave critical comments unanswered, that is seen as bad for your brand reputation.
17. Page likes & followers
The obvious sign that your social media marketing campaigns are powerful and working is enhanced page likes and followers. Building following suggests that more and more people are becoming attracted to your brand and want to have your posts and updates in their newsfeed.
However, owning a million followers base that is not involved with your content is worthless. The total number of followers you have is only the number of people who could see your posts. Generally, it is more useful to have 1000 followers who actively engage with your content than owning 1 million followers that never like, comment, or share your content.
18. Mentions
Tags or mentions of your brand prove that people are talking about you despite the fact that your brand is active on that social media channel or not. Being mentioned and tagged by people generates a greater awareness of your brand, plus there’s no better advocate of your business than your consumers that make a free advertisement of your product/service that way.
19. Engagement
Engagement is one of the most important KPIs that you should be concentrating on when it comes down to social media marketing.
In social media, engagement is all about measuring the number of likes, comments, and shares that your social media posts receive.
Most social media platforms’ algorithms act like that: the more likes, comments, and shares your social media posts hold, the more attention it will get. Instagram, for instance, currently gives more attention to post saving and sharing rather than comments and likes, but they still perform a vital role.
20. Reach
This social media KPI gauges the number of unique accounts opened and has seen your social media post. Owning a broader reach is great for brand awareness, but you should strive not only to reach a lot of people with your posts but make them involved with them.
21. Impressions
Whereas impressions cover the total number of how many times your post showed up in someone’s feed. That, however, doesn’t mean that this person necessarily has seen your post; it means that they had a chance to.
22. Customer satisfaction
Customer satisfaction shows how happy your customers are with your services. Therefore, the greater your customer satisfaction score is, the better.
Customer satisfaction should be a priority for every business, as the more unsatisfied customers you have, the more money you’ll waste. And no business desires that. If your customers are happy with your services, your business will improve, but if they aren’t, you’ll notice the rest of your marketing and business KPIs decreasing.
23. Sales pipeline velocity
Sales velocity is a major B2B marketing KPI that estimates the speed at which you’re making money. The sales pipeline velocity determines how quickly leads are going through your pipeline and how much value customers present for your business over a given period. The faster the leads are going, the faster you can achieve more deals.
24. Landing page conversion rate
Every landing page aims to compel visitors to act, such as downloading a white paper, subscribing to a newsletter, signing up for a free trial, filling out a form, registering for a webinar, etc. You can establish landing page conversion goals and estimate the number and the quality of leads that every landing page generates.
Then, if you find that your landing page conversion rate is low, you’ll understand that you have to improve the landing page’s content and design. Here are some tips:
- Build landing page content that aligns straight with the traffic source
- Enhance page speed
- Make sure your landing page is mobile-friendly
- Use clear and particular CTAs
- Make the CTA buttons stand out
- Add a feeling of urgency into your copy
25. Sales close rate
The sales close rate means how a salesperson is working while closing deals; also, You can quickly calculate that by dividing the number of closed deals by the number of lead opportunities the salesperson had during a particular period.
Conclusion
The overall purpose of marketing KPIs is to understand customers and enhance the business’s revenue. Loaded with these metrics, you’ll be ready to validate everything you do as a marketer, every single campaign with which you present qualified leads to sales.
FAQs
1. What are the top most marketing KPIs you should track?
Some of the most important KPIs are
a) Return on Investment
b) Bounce rate
c) Conversion rate
d) Customer acquisition cost
e) Sales close rate
f) Customer satisfaction
g) Leads
2. What are the KPIs for digital marketing?
Digital marketing KPIs are
a) Web traffic sources
b) Brand awareness
c) Cost per lead
d) Returning Visitors
e) Online conversion rates
f) Website traffic leads