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“If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it” - Peter Drucker
What is the greatest asset for a marketer?
A mastery of copywriting?
A way with webpage optimizing?
An uncanny ability to bring in quality leads regularly?
Sure, it is all of that - but there’s one more weapon that is a must in every marketer’s war chest.
An ability to sift through data and make key marketing decisions.
That’s where Marketing metrics come in - whether it is building out webpages or placing CTAs at the right place, or posting on social media, the only way you can gauge the success of your marketing is by measuring the right set of metrics.
In this post, we look at the most important marketing metrics to track across functions and why those metrics are so crucial.
Operational metrics are the most important marketing metrics to track and every marketer should be on top of them. These are the numbers that provide the big picture on where the company is headed and what needs to be the focus of the marketing team going forward.
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is the total money you spend on sales and marketing efforts to acquire a new customer.
Why is this metric important?
This metric is crucial for SaaS companies to track as the difference between high CAC and low CAC is what defines whether the business will soar or go bust.
Example:
Lifetime Value or Customer Lifetime Value is the total money you are likely to earn from any customer over the life of their account - in other words, LTV represents how much a customer will pay between sign up and churn.
Example:
If your product is priced at $20/mo and an average customer is expected to stick around for a year, then your customer LTV is $20 x 12 months = $240.
Why is this metric important?
Lifetime Value helps you gauge the pulse of your business - without knowing how much a potential customer will bring in, it’s tough to account how much you can spend to acquire customers.
When it comes to LTV and CAC, the general school of thought is, your LTV should be 3X your CAC - a 3:1 ratio earning your $3 for $1 spent on sales and marketing.
In the above example, your CAC should ideally be no more than one third of your LTV ($240), which comes to $80 spend for a potential customer.
Why is this metric important?
We know an ideal LTV to CAC ratio is 3:1.
But what if that is not the case?
Say it is 1:1, it means you are just breaking even, earning only as much from a customer as you're spending to acquire them.
If it is less than that, you are hemorrhaging money and should get to revisiting your entire operational strategy right-away.
What if it was much better than 3:1? Say somewhere like 5:1?
In that case, you can actually invest more on sales and marketing efforts which will translate into even more revenue for your business.
Time to Payback CAC or the payback period is the number of months it takes for you to earn back the money you spent on a customer in the form of revenue.
This is usually calculated for a year.
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A Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) is a lead that is more likely to become a customer than other leads.
This qualification could have been arrived at based on the web pages visited, what they’ve downloaded, and other engagement criteria set by the marketing team.
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The biggest difference and indicator that your marketing leads may be sales-ready is their willingness and desire to turn your lecture into a conversation. Not that marketing doesn’t involve interaction.
A sales-qualified lead (SQL) is a prospective customer that has been researched and vetted -- first by an organization's marketing department and then by its sales team – and is deemed ready for the next stage in the sales process. An SQL has displayed intent to buy a company's products and has met an organization's lead qualification criteria that determine whether a buyer is a right fit. The label is applied to a prospect that has gone past the engagement stage and is ready to be pursued for conversion into a full-fledged customer.
Trial Signups is the number of users who sign up for your product in any given period.
For a SaaS product catering to the SMB market, the ideal timeframe to track trial users is week after week.
Why is this metric important?
Trial signups is a key metric because it has a direct correlation with sales as only a portion of the trial users will end up converting.
Tracking trial users tells you how well your business is doing and helps you answer important questions like how much budget to allocate for the marketing efforts, which channels to focus on, and whether you are on track to hit your revenue goals.
Conversion rate is the percentage of free trial users who ultimately become your paid customers.
# paid users / # of free trial users * 100
Why is this metric important?
While the number of trial signups gives a good picture of how many leads are entering into your sales funnel, conversion rate is the number that really matters - as it tells you what percentage of free users become your paid customers.
If you notice that there are a lot of trial users signing up but only a very small percentage of them convert, it could signal a misalignment between the marketing and sales/ product teams.
It could due to a number of reasons: the marketing efforts could be attracting poor quality leads, or the messaging on the landing pages could be overstating the product capabilities - in any case, it warrants an urgent discussion with other teams to understand how you are faring against the industry benchmarks.
Conversion trail is the tracing back of a paid customer’s journey to identify their first point of contact in your website.
Mapping the customer’s journey through the buyer’s journey will give you valuable insights on what is the most common path users take before deciding to purchase your product.
Customer churn is the percentage of customers that stopped using your company's product or service during a certain time frame. You can calculate churn rate by dividing the number of customers you lost during that time period -- say a quarter -- by the number of customers you had at the beginning of that time period.
Why is this metric important?
While fixing the customer churn may be more of a customer success person’s responsibility or something that the product team works towards eliminating, there is certainly a lot of useful data for the marketing team to invest their time into reading it.
Analyzing how and when churn occurs helps you ensure there are preemptive measures.
Traffic: Leads Ratio is the percentage of website visitors who convert to leads.
Leads/ Website Traffic * 100
Why is this metric important?
Traffic:leads is a key marketing KPI to help you gauge the quality of your website visitors.
For example, if you have a high website traffic but only a fraction of those visitors express interest in your product, it is cue to reevaluate your website - whether it is the messaging or the placement of CTA buttons, or other factors like page load time which is preventing the visitors from taking the action you want them to.
A widely accepted benchmark is 2 to 4 percent conversion rate from website visit to leads, a dip below which is an urgent call to rethink your customer trail on your website.
Content Engine Metrics are KPIs purely tied to your content marketing efforts - this includes tracking your blog performance, lead magnets, content calendars etc.
When it comes to content marketing, running a blog is arguably the #1 strategy to get organic traffic for your website in the long run. This is a no-brainer especially for small businesses who don’t have a fortune to spend on paid marketing methods.
Why is this metric important?
When maintaining a blog, one of the important KPIs is the monthly blog traffic to measure your ROI - one important thing to keep in mind is, content marketing is a long haul game and you will not see the results until after 6-8 months after publishing blogs.
This metric tells you which of your blogs bring the most traffic to your site at any given period.
Given content marketing is a long-term game that will take up a lot of your time and resources, it is important to measure the direction you are headed with the relevant KPIs, your most popular being one of the most important.
Why is this metric important?
Understanding which blogs bring the most traffic to your website helps you answer important questions like what type of content resonates with your prospects, which keywords perform the best and many other useful details - looking at this data you can decide what works and what doesn’t, doubling down on the winning formula.
Backlinks are links that are redirected to your website from other websites on the internet as a source of reference. These are also called inbound links and signal how popular your content is amongst other sites in your domain.
Why is this metric important?
Backlinks are one of the important SEO factors that determines your search engine rankings.
In fact, industry leaders in SEO like Ahrefs, Moz calculate a website’s domain authority based on the # of backlinks.
Knowing how many websites refer back to your site, particularly those in the same niche helps you identify if and whether you need to allocate resources to it - for example, companies like Hubspot, Canva are known for proactive backlink outreach resulting in millions of website visitors every month.
Organic Traffic is the number of visits to your website as a result of organic (non-paid) search traffic and is the most important KPI to measure your content marketing efforts.
Why is this metric important?
While the blog traffic metric tells how many people visit your blogs, only a small portion of them will be interested in your product and will eventually visit your website.
For example, if the blog gets a decent amount of traffic, but the same does not translate into interest in your product, it is a cue to evaluate your content marketing funnel such as the lead magnets, email drip campaigns etc.
Domain Authority (DA) is a search engine ranking score developed by Moz that predicts how likely a website is to rank on search engine result pages (SERPs). A Domain Authority score ranges from one to 100, with higher scores corresponding to a greater ability to rank.
An important point to remember is Domain Authority is not a metric used by Google in determining search rankings and has no effect on the SERPs but is simply an indicator of how likely your content is to rank on search results.
Why is this metric important?
Domain Authority is the single most important KPI for the marketing team to measure how their efforts across channels has yielded results in a given period.
Though there is no single activity that you can do to improve the DA right away, a string of focused efforts will start to reflect on the DA score.
Search Engine Results Pages (also known as “SERPs” or “SERP”) are Google’s response to a user’s search query. SERPs tend to include organic search results, paid Google Ads results, Featured Snippets, Knowledge Graphs and video results.
Why is this metric important?
The SERPs determines how your site appears on Google’s first page.
For example, let’s say you rank your site on the first page of Google for the keyword “how to start a website”.
Social Sharing refers to the number of blog readers who end up sharing the article to their friends and followers through different social media platforms.
You can easily set this up and track the metrics using handy plugins that let the readers to easily share a blog post that they liked to their network.
Why is this metric important?
Social shares are a key metric for two reasons:
Page (or scroll) depth measures how thoroughly your audience consumes your content by tracking where on the page they stop reading.
Why is this metric important?
Scroll depth basically is a measure of the quality of content and how it is presented. Here are two factors to measure:
Readability: If your content is easy to read, people will go further down the page.
Interest: It is assumed that the further people scroll down your page, the more they want to consume your content.
Bonus Read: How to Track & Analyze Scroll Depth in Google Analytics
If you have an eBook or other lead magnets on your website, the most important KPI to measure is the number of downloads they get in a period of time.
Why is this metric important?
Lead magnets are typically long-form content that you put out on the web that visitors can download usually by filling out a form and providing their email address.
They are great indicators to help you identify the hot leads who consent to give their email address - you can add these leads to a separate mailing list and nurture them with drip campaigns until they are ready to have a conversation about your product.
Subscribers Rate refers to the number of blog visitors who subscribe to your blog.
Why is this metric important?
Like visitors who download your content, blog subscribers are warm leads who are most likely to become your customers - since they already like the content you publish, they are familiar with your brand and will give your product a serious consideration when they are in need of a solution. Having them on a nurture list and regularly sending them content helps your product to stay on top of their minds.
Content Pipeline, also known as Average time to Content refers to the time it takes between publishing new content on your website.
Why is this metric important?
The Average Time to New Content KPI is a highly useful metric to stay on top of the marketing activities planned by the marketing team at any given period.
It gives insight on how effective the team is, in producing new content, and allocates resources accordingly.
For example, if the marketing team consistently struggles to meet the quota for new blogs published, it could signal a need for bringing on board additional members to the team.
Website Analytics metrics are KPIs around the website that gives a complete overview of how the website is performing, whether it is optimised for traffic etc.
Most visited Pages refers to the top pages on your site that gets most visits in a given time period.
Why is this metric important?
The Most visited pages is an important KPI to understand the buyer’s journey. By mapping hot leads and eventual customers to the pages they visited before they decided to subscribe to your product, the marketing team can pay more attention to the top pages and improving on them - this will also drive significant organic traffic to those pages,
Website Demographics refers to the metric of the number of website visitors and the regions they visit your site.
Why is this metric important?
The Website Demographics KPI gives you more context into where your visitors are from, and how they landed on your site. For example, at any given time if you notice higher than usual traffic from a particular region you can dig deep into it and double down on the outreach efforts by running specific campaigns, Google ads, or social media ads.
Time on Site refers to how many minutes (or) seconds visitors spend on an average on your site before exiting.
It is an engagement metric that signals the visitors’ level of interest in your website content.
Why is this metric important?
With the deluge of content available, most website visitors spend an incredibly short amount of time before deciding if it’s worth their attention - in fact, research shows users spend an average of less than 15 seconds.
By tracking this metric, you can immediately jump to action when the numbers fall significantly higher or lower than the threshold.
The bounce rate is the percentage of your website visitors who exit right after viewing just a single page. It is a metric closely tied to the average time spent on site, being inversely proportional.
Why is this metric important?
The Bounce Rate KPI indicates how website visitors engage with your content - for example, a high bounce rate might mean the content does resonate with the audience. On the other hand, a lower bounce rate on specific web pages means you can experiment with more CTAs to get the visitors to take the desired action.
Goal Conversion is a KPI specific to Google Analytics - a must in every marketer’s toolkit.
With Google Analytics, you can keep track of the actions of your website visitors.
A goal conversion (or goal completion) takes place when your visitors complete a specific action you are tracking—for example, make a purchase, add a product to cart, or sign up for your blog, land on a particular page of your website. It helps to understand and measure the success of marketing campaigns.
You can access the Goals report under Conversion > Goals > Overview inside your Google Analytics account.
Why is this metric important?
By tracking specific goals and their conversion rate, you can tell how well your website is doing at a glance.
For example, say you have set up a goal tracking people who visit a specific product page in your website - at any given time period you can tell what percentage of the website visitors are taking that exact action.
In Google Analytics, the goal conversion rate is calculated as the number of goal conversions divided by the number of sessions, times 100.
Website Traffic is the most basic and important KPI for a company - it tells how many users visit your website at any given time period.
Why is this metric important?
For a SaaS product, or even any online business, website traffic is the most influencing factor - it is the virtual equivalent of a foot traffic for a mall.
By regularly monitoring website traffic, you can set goals and milestones and align every aspect of your marketing efforts accordingly. For example, if you notice a sudden drop in traffic, or say a surge around the holiday season, you can give out discounts to convert the leads into customers.
New vs. Unique visitors is another Google Analytics metric that gives a granular view of the website traffic.
Google Analytics defines new visitors as anyone who has never been on your website before. Check out how how to track organic new users in Google Analytics.
Returning visitors, on the other hand, is anyone who visits your website more than once.
Note: Given Google Analytics tracks these numbers using tracking snippets (based on your website cookies), they might deviate a little from the actual numbers.
For example, if a person views your website in incognito mode, and again visits your site logged into their Google account, GA calculates it as two new sessions instead of one.
Apart from time spent on page, and bounce rate, the Average Sessions Duration is a key performance indicator that illustrates how long users typically stay on your site - Google Analytics calculates sessions by breaking down into 30-minute windows.
A good average session duration is anywhere between 120 and 180 seconds.
Note: Average Sessions Duration refers to how much users spend across the website in a given session while the Average Time on Page refers to the time spent on particular web pages.
Why is this metric important?
Average Sessions Duration is very helpful with the additional context of metrics like segmented views, traffic sources and in consideration and other engagement metrics, so you can work on the product messaging accordingly.
The Site Funnel metrics refers to a series of pages on your website that you expect visitors to move through before signing up for your product. This can be created and tracked using Google Analytics.
Why is this metric important?
Site funnel KPI paints the picture of what percentage of users pass through the specific pages you want - for example, you might want a blog visitor to go back to your website landing page, and visit the pricing page and so on.
Once you’ve mapped the site funnel, you can measure how many users follow through, and if there’s significant drop-off at some stage. For instance, if you notice that users visit the pricing page but there’s a stark drop at that stage, - though not necessarily, it could still give you something to think about how your pricing page is built or even if your pricing is fair reflection of what the product offers.
Page load speeds refer to the time it takes to load and display the entire content of a web page for the website visitors.
The industry benchmark for page load speeds is somewhere between 1 and 2 seconds.
Why is this metric important?
Page load speeds have become one of the most important factors determining whether a prospect lands on your site or your competitor’s.
According to Google, if a site takes longer than 3 seconds to load, 53% of the mobile visitors abandon the site. An additional 1-2 seconds, and that number increases to 87%.
That means, you have to track the page load speeds constantly and ensure there are no glitches - as that could become the difference between a sale closed and lost.
Sessions by Device Type metric refers to what percentage of users visit your website using which device - whether desktop or tablet or mobile phones.
Why is this metric important?
In the last few years, sessions by device type have become a key metric for marketing teams - with large displays and intuitive interface, mobiles and tablets have become household devices for customers and prospects alike.
Knowing how your users browse your site gives you insights that you can use to design your website for a smooth experience. Device types also help you on paid campaigns, allowing you to spread your ad budget across devices based on the website data.
Outbound metrics are a set of marketing metrics around your outreach efforts - this includes email marketing, social media, and paid campaigns.
Email open rates is the percentage of subscribers who open the email you send.
Why is this metric important?
Email opens are the most fundamental aspect of email marketing campaigns - after all, if your subscribers are not opening your email, it doesn't matter how great your product is, or how convincing your CTAs are.
Open Rates are vital to understanding how your subscribers are engaging with your messages.
For example, if you notice a consistently poor string of open rates (Industry benchmark is somewhere near 24%) it is time to revisit your subject line copy which can significantly improve your open rates.
CTR is another important email marketing metric that helps you determine how well your campaigns are performing.
It refers to the percentage of users who click on a link or CTA in your email. Click-through-rates are usually much lower than open rates at less than 4%.
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Why is this metric important?
CTRs are the other half of the equation that determines the success of your campaign - while your first aim should be to get the subscribers to open your email, the ultimate goal is to get them to click your CTA and take the desired action - whether it is reading a blog post or signing up for a free trial etc.
Measuring CTRs give you the right context to center your marketing activities, set benchmarks and goals.
List growth rate refers to the percentage growth of new subscribers to your email list over a period of time.
Why is this metric important?
With Email marketing being one of the best channels in terms of ROI, it is important to track how your email list is growing over a period of time.
Campaign ROI refers to the Return on Investment from your email campaigns - in other words, it is total $ value of customers who convert from your email marketing campaign.
Why is this metric important?
Given the time and resources poured into email marketing (building lists, setting up campaigns, spend on email marketing tools), you need to be able to decide if you are seeing a return on your investment which the Campaign ROI metric provides.
Multiple opens refer to the same recipient opening your email multiple times.
Why is this metric important?
Multiple opens is an indicator of your recipient’s level of interest in your offering - by tracking this, you can follow up with them personally, add them to a different campaign, or even give them a call and fast-track the deal close.
Email deliverability rates is the rate of emails that successfully lands in your subscribers’ inboxes.
Why is this metric important?
Deliverability Rates help marketers gauge the likelihood of their email campaigns reaching their subscribers’ inboxes related to actual delivery– if you notice a poor rate of delivery it is cue to revisit your email marketing strategy - it could be a list clean-up, check for spam issues, and spacing out your emails better etc.
Email Unsubscribes refer to the number of subscribers who ‘unsubscribe’ from your emails.
Why is this metric important?
While subscribers might decide to unsubscribe from your emails for a number of reasons out of your control, if the number is on the high consistently, then it is time for you to dig deeper - the average benchmark is less than 0.2% below which means you have to identify and fix the issue that is causing people to opt out of your emails.
Reply Rates are an important email marketing KPI to measure the campaign’s success. Positive reply rates refer to the number of recipients who show an interest in your product.
Why is this metric important?
A positive reply from your potential customer means there is a good chance to get them to sign up for your product if you act fast, striking the iron while it is hot. Measuring reply rates allow you to set a benchmark and email marketing goals and plan your campaigns accordingly.
Number of Social Posts refers to the total number of posts across all the popular social media platforms you are active on including LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Instagram and Quora.
Why is this metric important?
The number of social media posts KPI helps to identify how your efforts are getting translated into results across platforms - you can view this along with other social media metrics to set platform benchmarks, KPIs for social media managers,
Impressions refers to how many times your posts showed up on a timeline or newsfeed. This KPI is calculated individually across platforms.
Why is this metric important?
Impressions metrics, when combined with other KPIs is a useful indicator for your posts’ performance - for example, if you notice that your posts have a high impressions count but a low engagement number, it likely means that your post wasn’t interesting enough for audiences to take action after seeing it in their feed.
Engagement Rate refers to the percentage of people who engage with your social media content - either by likes, comments, or shares.
Why is this metric important?
Engagement Rate tells you how your audience resonates with your content - a low number might mean tweaking with the times you post, changing the type of content etc.
Like emails, Click-through-rates for social media refers to the number of followers who click a link on your social post that takes them to your website or blog.
Why is this metric important?
Social media channels can become great drivers of website traffic if done right - measuring the CTR allows you to understand how many users visit your site after a post on the social platforms.
Followers are social media users who have opted to receive your content on their timeline.
Why is this metric important?
Followers count is a clear indicator of a user’s interest in your content or even your product or service - by measuring the followers growth, you can understand how your reach is improving over time.
Mentions refers to the brand keywords of your product or company that people use on their posts. In other words, it is keeping track of social media posts that talk about you or your brand.
Why is this metric important?
With the growing social media popularity, the platforms have become a town hall for your target audience, potential customers, and customers all hang out together - and they talk about your product!
There are many tools such as Mention, that instantly notifies when people talk about your product so you can engage with them right away. This is one of the most important factors to build out a brand presence on social channels.
Quality Score is a rating given by Google for the quality and relevance of both your keywords and PPC ads. It is used to determine your cost per click (CPC) and multiplied by your maximum bid to determine your ad rank in the ad auction process.
Why is this metric important?
Quality Scores is one of the most important KPIs when running paid ad campaigns because it directly influences how much you spend on ads - a good quality score will lower both your cost per click and your cost per conversions.
CTR is a key metric for campaign performance. It is measured by dividing the total number of clicks your campaign gets by the total impressions.
For example, if your ads had 1000 impressions, and 100 clicks, the CTR is 10%.
Why is this metric important?
Knowing what CTR is and how to measure it is key to being able to gauge the success of your PPC campaigns.
It is not only important for benchmarking and improving the CTR, but also affects other key KPIs like Quality score.
Cost-per-click refers to the exact money spent on advertising for a single click.
It is calculated by dividing the total cost of a campaign by the number of times the ad was clicked in that campaign.
Why is this metric important?
Cost-per-click is an important metric for advertisers because, while most have a prefixed budget to spend, CPC tells how much money is exactly spent to get one click - this can be benchmarked against other channels like email marketing, Social ads, to arrive at which channel has the best ROI.
View-through conversions refer to people who saw your ad but do not click. However, they end up visiting your site at a later time.
Why is this metric important?
View-through conversions are an important metric when running paid campaigns since only a very small percentage of users click on your ads - this KPI helps you understand how many users did not click your ad but still that influenced them to visit your site.
Average Position metric tells advertisers which position in the search results their ad is shown in most of the time.
Why is this metric important?
Given that ads are shown at the very top of the search engine results, Google balances both paid and organic search results for almost every search query entered.
Average position tells you where exactly your ads are shown - this helps you understand if you are getting a good ROI. For example, if your ad is shown most of the times in the #3, it may not be getting as many clicks as you expected.
For a marketer, the marketing metrics is like a compass that guides you toward your ultimate goal.
Use this comprehensive list of metrics across functions to help your team achieve its targets.
If you are looking for a sleek and powerful way to wield these metrics without having to handle multiple sheets or export a dozen times, check out Dataflo a lite weight data anlaysis tool built for SMBs to help pull data from across your tech stack. Book a demo today.
Krishna is dedicated to helping brands and startups grow through user-centric product design that helps them get the most out of their data. He acts as a conduit, understanding what customers need and then creating products that meet those needs. He is a nature enthusiast and has fondness for great music and movies.
