KPIs Every Digital Marketer Should Track

As a Marketing leader –  identifying, defining, and generating momentum around metrics that matter for your organization is critical. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), are more than just wishful thinking written in a system. When done correctly, they can enable you to solve common challenges and achieve significant goals across your organization. 

In the case of Marketing, Sales, and Product leaders, using KPIs to make data-driven decisions when planning initiatives is an important responsibility and output your teams and executive sponsors expect to see. These highly visible cross-collaborative teams are often dependent on one another in achieving their goals.

We’ve pulled together some of the most common KPIs you should report on across these pivotal departments to help keep everyone on the same page.

What are Marketing KPIs?

Let’s start at the beginning! What are Marketing KPIs? Marketing KPIs, or key performance indicators, are specific, numerical metrics used to measure progress toward a defined goal within your various marketing channels. These defined goals could be focused on anything from the performance of your email and SMS messaging strategy, to which content is resonating best with your intended audience, the costs associated with acquiring a new client (CAC), to the number of prospects and partners in your pipeline. 

Getting Aligned

The first step in the entire KPI process is to determine which KPIs matter most to you and your organization as a whole, which can easily be done through a dashboard prototyping session. 

Based on the priorities that are identified through this exercise, confirm which reports are currently available to support the tracking of these goals, and which ones you need to plan to build reports around. This might require more handy work in the process, like data cleansing, creating new data attributes or even using a new piece of technology to measure and monitor.

Keep in mind that different departments and levels of seniority will have different needs of the reporting (and subsequent dashboards), but it is important to keep everyone’s needs in mind when documenting the requirements (both visually and technically).

How to Track Marketing KPIs

We recommend teams focus on 3 key areas when measuring KPIs:

1. End-to-End Lifecycle Marketing KPIs
2. Pipeline & Revenue Related KPIs
3. Operational Efficiency KPIs

Let’s take a closer look at some of the specific examples of KPIs we recommend tracking.

End-to-End Lifecycle Marketing KPIs

These KPIs should be tied to marketing activities that revolve around your end-to-end customer lifecycle and journey. When you engage your list of emailable prospects, it’s critical to understand how the content you are sending them is impacting your brand as a whole. 

Questions to Ask as You Align on Metrics & KPIs Here:

• How are prospects/ customers finding & interacting with your brand or content today?
• What content or pieces are driving the most engagement?
• What are some of the final pieces before a prospect/lead makes it’s way into qualified?
• How can we gauage the overall performance of a campaign?

General

• Top 5 Marketing Tactics
• Cost Per Campaign
• Top Referral Source

Email/SMS Channels

• Unsubscribe rate
• Bounce rate
• Inbox Placement Rate
• Email device and client usage
• Revenue/Value per subscriber
• Engagement over time (not just by send)
• Sourced Site Visits
• Number & Percentage of Opens
• Number & Percentage of Clicks
• Number & Percentage of Opt outs
• Number & Percentage of Conversions (i.e. site visit, purchase, download, etc.)
• A/B/C Variant Wins

Social (Paid vs Organic)

• Sourced Site Visits
• Visits to Create Sign Up/Conversion
• Average Time on Page
• Cost Per Tactic
• View Through Rate
• A/B/C Variant Wins

Product or Ecommerce Performance

If you’re an organization who is running a PLG (product-led growth) strategy or have an ecommerce experience, there are metrics that you should keep an eye on, as a way to measure and monitor the impact of not only the product but how we’re marketing that product.

Questions to Ask as You Align on Metrics:

• How many conversions are you currently driving to the site from key channels?
• Have you seen a change in new users of your product? 
• How should you adapt to retain these users? 

Generate Web/Page

• Measure Web Experience Funnel Stages
• Top 5 Pages
• Top 5 Visit to Conversion Blog
• Average Time Spent on Page
• Number Of Pages to Conversion
• Bounce Rate

Trial Users

• Cost Per Sign Up
• Total Number of Direct New Users
• Total Number of Affiliated Users
• Users by Number of Graphs

Paid Users

• Percentage of Trial to Paid User
• Total Number of Direct New Users
• Total Number of Affiliated Users
• Win/Rate from Trial to Paid
• Customer Lifetime Value
• Avg. MRR(Monthly Recurring Revenue)/ARR(Annual Recurring Revenue) from Paid User

All Users:

• Time on Key Pages
• Time to Create First Graph
• Number of Return Users

Pipeline & Revenue Related KPIs

Understanding & aligning to key pipeline metrics is paramount to your teams success and collaboration on hitting your company’s objectives. Alignment around these types of metrics 

• The marketing team needs to accurately measure and account for what pipeline their influenced. 
• The sales team needs to understand and work the open pipeline they have.
• The executive team members need to see above it all and forecast EDITA & Growth or Churn in the organization
• The customer success team needs to understand who’s coming down the pipeline they should be prepared to onboard. 

At all times, sales leaders should have visibility into their pipeline. These are the questions they must be answering to their executive team members:

• Which prospects are close to conversion? 
• How much is currently in your pipeline? 
• How often are your account executives closing deals vs. losing them? 

Partner/Channel Based

• Number of Prospective Partners in Pipeline
• Partner Pipeline Value
• Partner Pipeline Velocity
• Partner Pipeline Win/Rate

Direct Prospects (Mid-Large Tier Business)

• Volume by Pipeline Stage
• Number Of Prospects In Pipeline
• Pipeline Win/Rate
• Pipeline Velocity

Direct Prospects (Small Business)

• Volume by Pipeline Stage
• Number Of Prospects In Pipeline
• Pipeline Win/Rate
• Pipeline Velocity

Revenue Related KPIs

Revenue-based KPIs monitor your revenue from all angles. Having an understanding of where your revenue is coming from and the patterns that can arise are a great starting point for your Sales and Marketing teams. They then can create targeted tactics to surround prospects and customers for a higher probability of wins. 

• MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue)
• ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue)
• EBITDA
• Revenue by Region
• Prospective Revenue by Region
• Revenue by Segment
• LTV (Lifetime Value)

Efficiency KPIs

Efficiency KPIs are important to understand how your marketing dollars are working on a per lead basis. Find the synergy of high win rates and low acquisition costs, and you’ll be sure to impress your budget holders.

Acquisition Costs By Segment

• Cost Per User (CPU)
• Cost Per Lead (CPL) 
• Cost Per Partner (CPP)  
• Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC) 

Why should you measure acquisition costs by segment? Your customer acquisition costs for 1 persona vs another persona may be drastically different. This could be, because one persona is your ideal buyer while another may be a more desirably

Speed to Market

• Cost Per Campaign
• Cost Per Conversion
• Campaign Time to Market (Ideation to Launch)

Is Tracking Marketing KPIs Worth It?

Taking time to establish KPIs across your customer lifecycles will help you gauge overall performance, build growth and retention, increase pipeline and revenue and increase overall efficiency. All incredibly impactful variables that are far from wishful thinking when put into a system. Aligning desired outcomes with available insights will help to identify incredible opportunities for growth.

Need help making these KPIs a reality in your revenue strategy? Interested in having us facilitate a KPI Workshops & Dashboard prototyping session of your own? Talk to Shift Paradigm today and we’ll set you and your goals on the right track.