8 Marketing KPIs You NEED To Be Measuring

4 min read
Sep 28, 2016 11:08:21 AM

Marketing KPIs You Need To Measure.A key performance indicator (KPI) is used to evaluate factors that are crucial to your business. Since there are many of them, it can feel daunting to keep track of all of them. The most important KPIs to measure will vary by organization or industry; here we look at the eight most important concerning inbound marketing. Don't get us wrong determining your companies ROI can be hard to understand as well. Read our Ebook and get a better grasp of it through your analytics. 

If understanding your ROI is a challenge then download this free ebook and  unlock the analytics behind it. 

     1. Sales Revenue

This is a measurement of how much revenue your inbound marketing campaign brought in. If you are unsure how much money your campaign generated—or did not generate—you can’t estimate the success of that marketing campaign. Understanding sales revenue will ensure that you are properly allotting money to the correct marketing efforts.

  1. Customer Acquisition Cost

How much does it cost to acquire a customer through your inbound marketing efforts? Time to find out. Customer acquisition cost (CAC) includes creative and technical manpower, technology and software costs (automation and CRM platforms), and general overhead costs. You can also use this to measure the success of a particular campaign or measure against outbound marketing cost if you are still using that approach as well.

  1. Customer Value or Lifetime Value of a Customer

This is a measure of how much a customer has purchased in a certain time frame, typically a year or lifetime. Although this figure may not be exact, it is a way to assess how much a customer has purchased and how long they have been a customer, within the bigger picture of your revenue. Lead nurturing is a great way to retain current customers. To figure out lifetime value, you can use this equation from Impact:

(Average sale per customer) x (Average number of times a customer buys per year) x (Average retention time [month/year/lifetime] for a typical customer).

  1. Traffic-To-Lead Ratio

Understanding website traffic and where it is coming from—organic search, SM, referrals, backlinks—is one of the most important KPIs to measure and understand. It is pretty straightforward: how many people visiting your website become leads. If you have high traffic, but low lead conversion, there’s probably something missing, so look at your site and figure it out. This metric also helps you understand the quality of your web traffic.

  1. Landing Page Conversion Rates

When you launch a campaign with an accompanying landing page, how well is it actually converting leads? Similar to traffic-to-lead ratio, if you are getting a lot of LP traffic, but a low conversion rate, something is missing. The entire point of a landing page is to generate leads so if it is not doing that it is worthless. We recommend A/B testing the page with color changes, content edits, different form questions, and CTA button options.

  1. Email Marketing Performance

You know that with inbound, email marketing is a critical component of your marketing strategy. So, of course, you need to know how well it is working! Measuring the success or failure of email campaigns is more complicated than other PKIs.

“Analyzing your email marketing strategy is multifaceted, however, and includes its own set of KPIs that should be dissected each on their own merits—delivery rate, unsubscribe rate, open rate, click-through rate, conversion rate, and forwards/shares.” Vital Design.

  1. Social Media Traffic

Social media traffic and conversion rates are invaluable to tracking a campaign's success. There are a few metrics you can be measuring, including the number of leads and conversions generated by a particular social media channel as well as the percentage of traffic specific to each channel. Since you can’t maximize every SM channel, you want to know which ones are performing the best by examining the number of leads, customers, and percentage of traffic coming from each one so you know where your target audience is and can focus those efforts. Some sites, like Facebook and Twitter, have built-in tracking which makes charting growth easy.

  1. Mobile Traffic

No inbound list is complete without measuring some form of mobile traffic. Here we are looking at traffic, leads, and conversion rates. You need to know how many of your web visitors are viewing on mobile—and, since this number is likely to continue to grow, ensure that your site is optimized for mobile.

When analyzing mobile numbers, look at: traffic, lead conversions, bounce rates, conversion rates from optimized landing pages, and which devices the most views are coming from. Just as with web traffic and landing pages, knowledge is power and understanding customer habits can help you tailor and improve their experience.

Remember, this list is not inclusive. While we have selected these eight KPI to highlight, there are other metrics to keep in mind, such as: lead-to-customer ratio, organic traffic, blog visits, link building (backlinks), and customer lead costs. Look at your specific business and campaigns to determine which KPIs are the most critical to the success of your business and start measuring them today.

If you are still using outbound marketing tactics and want to learn how inbound can elevate your business, check out this free marketing guide.  inbound marketing 101

Get Email Notifications