As a marketer, you know that marketing metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) are crucial. You need to track marketing metrics to understand the performance of your marketing campaigns and tweak them as you go.
But there’s just one small problem: There are thousands of KPIs out there, you can get lost quite easily if you don’t know what to track. And if so, your marketing efforts may be in vain.
So which marketing metrics should you track?
Depending on your marketing strategies and campaigns, it can vary drastically, so here’s a quick guide to help you choose the right marketing metrics depending on your objectives.
What are marketing metrics?
Marketing metrics are measurable values (numbers, percentages, etc.), usually tracked by marketers or agencies, to showcase the performance of their marketing campaigns across all their different marketing channels.
Marketing metrics are usually presented in a marketing report with charts, lists, and graphs. The metrics are usually shown in either a monthly, quarterly, or weekly report in order to show enough data to be statistically relevant.
For example, here’s a social media report template that is built with some of the most popular marketing metrics:
Top marketing metrics by type
Paid marketing metrics
Paid marketing, otherwise known as PPC, display ads, or online advertising, are basically any online marketing in the form of ads. Most marketers will use marketing platforms such as: Google Ads, Bing Ads, Facebook Ads, and many others. For this type of marketing, you really need to know if your marketing investment was worth it. The most crucial metrics to track for your paid advertising:
1. Conversion metrics
Conversion metrics are all the different data showing the number of customers who clicked on your ads and then converted as a client, a trial, or anything else that you’ve set up as the goal of your campaign. Metrics like:
- Conversion rate
- Total number of conversions
- Click-through rate (CTR)
2. ROAS (Return On Ad Spend)
Return On Ad Spend (ROAS) is the amount of revenue your business earns for each dollar it spends on advertising. Basically, it measures if your ads are worth your pennies or not. If you’re looking for an even more important metric than conversion, well, this one may take the cake!
- In the same vein as return on ad spend, you could also track:
- Customer acquisition cost (CAC)
- Cost per lead (CPL)
- Marketing spend
- Customer lifetime value (CLV)
These should all help you know how much it costs you to bring new customers (or new leads) to your business.
See this guide for more information about PPC bidding and how to improve your ROAS.
SEO marketing metrics
SEO (search engine optimization) is every strategy you put in place to rank better on search engines such as Google and Bing. You can use tools like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, SEMrush, Ahrefs and more, to track all your SEO metrics. A great way to track your SEO and website performance quickly is to use a Google Analytics dashboard, or an SEO report template.
3. Search traffic metrics
Here are some metrics that should help you better understand your traffic, from the amount of time spent on your website, to the number of pages they see:
- Website visitors
- Bounce rate
- Page views
- Landing page performance
- Session duration
4. Keyword rankings metrics
Keyword rankings are key marketing metrics for your SEO strategies to see for which keywords you are currently ranking on search engines, and which ones your content marketing team needs to work on. You can use tools such as Google Search Console, SEMrush, or Keyword.com to track it. It includes KPIs such as:
- Keyword position
- Top queries by click
- Keyword position change
Social media marketing metrics
Social media metrics are particularly important for understanding your brand awareness and referral traffic for your website.
5. Engagement metrics
Engagement is super important, you want your audience to engage with your brand. And that means liking, commenting, clicking, and sharing your content. These marketing metrics will help you track your organic social media performance and know which posts worked out best:
- Top posts by engagement
- Engagement rate
- Likes & Comments
- Shares
- Number of subscribers
6. Conversions & clicks
It’s important to add your social media conversions to see if your social strategies are aimed at the right target audience, an audience that’ll click and convert. You’ve got a couple of comments and shares on your posts, but did anyone click on your links or CTAs? Convert into clients? After all, lead generation is everyone’s bottom line.
- Number of clicks
- Click-through rate
- Conversion rate
Email marketing metrics
Whether it’s part of your marketing funnel, or just a newsletter, you have to know how your email marketing is performing. No matter which automation email tool you are using, from Mailchimp to Hubspot, you have to know if your subscribers opened your emails, clicked on your CTAs, converted as paying customers, unsubscribed, and much more.
7. Open rate
What’s the number of leads that opened your emails? That metric gives you a good idea of if your subject line is working or not, and if your audience is interested in what you send them. For ideas and examples of subject lines that you can use, check out this guide on the best email subject lines.
To understand your performance, simply track these 2 metrics:
- Open rate
- Number of email opens
You should also track how many people unsubscribed, or new subscribers you gain, as this will also give you an idea of whether your emails are in line with your audience.
8. Click-through rate
Not only should your audience open your email, but they should also click on your CTAs and convert them into paying customers. Here are the metrics to track this:
- Click-through rate (CTR)
- Conversion rate
- Number of clicks
BONUS: project management metrics
Your marketing team and sales team need to track their own project management as well! And to do so, here are some metrics you could track.
Productivity
Your productivity can be determined by a plethora of metrics depending on what your objectives are. You could track your number of marketing qualified leads (mql) or sales qualified leads (sql), but also the number of landing pages your content marketing team produced, or the total revenue over a given time period.
Return on Investment (ROI)
Return on investment is one of the most important metrics to track in order to know if your marketing strategies performed well or not.
Customer satisfaction
From retention to the lifetime value of a customer, your customer’s satisfaction can really impact your bottom line. So make sure you track this metric as well.
Let the measuring begin
Choosing metrics that are aligned with your marketing goals and tracking them efficiently makes it easy to create clear reports. From PPC to email marketing and SEO, you should now be ready to track everything you need.
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