How to develop meaningful marketing metrics

Sherri Kolomayz, Digital Campaign Manager, Infor

If you aren’t tracking the right marketing metrics, you aren’t going to get the C-suite support you need.  Gone are the days when marketing metrics aren’t directly tied to the overall business strategies and goals.  In order to be successful, marketers need to align their metrics to confidently show an impact that meets the business objectives.  But the critical question here is what are the ‘right’ metrics?

Every business has its own set of metrics to measure success driven from the top down.  The important thing is to harness those metrics to provide insight in to the direction and success of marketing efforts.  It’s critical that your metrics resonate with the CEO, CFO, and your sales team. 

How to define KPIs

Key Performance Indicators (KPI) are measurable values that demonstrates how effectively a company is achieving key business objectives. To be meaningful, these KPIs should:

Measure performance data that can be trusted, easily obtained and tracked regularly

Be consistent to keep everyone on the same page and moving in the same direction

Be reliable and accurate.

Give insight into the business that is actionable.

So what are these metrics? Broadly there are two types:

Conversion metrics

Conversion metrics are measured by the percentage of people who take a desired action.  For example, how many new leads did a campaign acquire? How many new customers and how much sales revenue did a campaign create? How many people downloaded an asset?  How many people attended an event?  All these metrics can show a count that you can track back to a KPI.

Soft metrics

Soft metrics such as impressions, page views, and SEO rankings are not easily tracked back to a defined customer acquisition or revenue metric, but they are still important as these types of metrics can help to derive insights into planned tactics for campaigns and brand awareness.

These categories span the most commonly used metrics:

Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI) – Tracking the results and financial impact of marketing campaigns that generate new customers or revenue.

Sales leads – Measuring how many leads marketing campaigns are generating. This metric can add real value to the relationship between marketing and sales for an organisation.

Lead Score – This metric measures the quality of an inbound lead based on predetermined criteria and targets. Lead score takes into account lead behaviour, activity, and demographics.

Cost Per Lead – Tracking the number of leads generated from a campaign against each dollar spent on that campaign.

Lead Funnel – Analysing how a lead moves through a campaign from one step to the next.  Track conversion rates from each stage of the funnel.

Social – Tracking not only the number of followers, engagements and visits but also specific behaviours.

SEO Traffic – Measuring the number of visits to a given website from organic or paid search traffic.

As the above lists show, there are a wide variety of marketing metrics a business can track.  The defining factor in assessing if they will be used should be how meaningful and effective they are for a given business.