10 Essential Marketing Metrics to Measure Success

As any seasoned professional knows, marketing and sales tend to strike a balance between art and science. The right ad campaign, website design, or sales pitch requires significant creativity. At the same time, organizations in any industry still need to tangibly measure their success to justify and optimize the resources spent to promote the brand, products, and services.

Finding and analyzing the most relevant marketing data is a core part of that equation. Business and marketing leaders can make more informed decisions about where to focus their efforts to maximize their ROI through the right marketing metrics and the right tools to measure them. 

Over the following few articles, this series will explore how organizations can measure their marketing and sales success. Today's introduction will include an overview of what success in marketing means, the metrics most commonly (and efficiently) used to measure that success, and some essential tools used to measure marketing success.

Table of Contents

 What Does Success in Marketing Mean?

Unfortunately, marketing data doesn't always equate to success. Vanity metrics have become famous for a reason, describing analytics that does little more than make the marketer look good in front of stakeholders. Impressions, reach, and a total number of likes fall into this vanity metrics category.

Instead, success in marketing tends to be contextual. It depends in large part on where a given campaign or effort falls in the marketing and sales funnel:

• The marketing funnel describes the customer journey from initial awareness to purchase. Relevant success metrics may range from reach and lead generation in the early stages to engagement, reviews, and customer conversions in the later stages.

• The sales funnel can be similar to the marketing funnel. Still, it focuses more specifically on leads in your database converting to repeat customers through sales activities like sales calls and follow-ups. Metrics likewise emphasize individual customer conversions, customer retention, and referral rates.

Both are similar, often overlapping concepts. The difference primarily consists of the fact that the former looks at metrics more closely related to broader marketing initiatives. At the same time, the latter focuses on the numbers associated with more personal, sales-focused conversations. Together they inform what we consider marketing success.

10 Common Marketing Metrics to Measure Success

The contextual nature of marketing success means that measuring it can be difficult. In fact, according to one survey, only 23% of marketing leaders know what KPIs to track to show the effectiveness of their campaigns. Another survey found that 48% of marketers are only somewhat confident that they can track the ROI of their campaigns.

Understanding the metrics available to you is the first step in remedying that concern. Below, we'll introduce some of the most common marketing metrics, separated by the funnel stage.

3 Relevant Marketing Metrics in the Awareness Stage of the Marketing Funnel

Digital marketing campaigns in the early stages tend to revolve around building brand awareness and recall. As a result, the most relevant metrics can help marketers track how many eyeballs their content and ads receive:

1. Impression Share: A more nuanced version of the traditional ad impressions metrics, impression share focuses on how your brand compares to your competitors. With a limited audience attention span, this metric helps you understand just how prominent you are in the mind of your target.

2. Engagement Rate: Calculated as all engagement (likes, comments, and shares) divided by total ad reach, your engagement rate shows just how effectively your ads get your audience's attention. Higher engagement rates suggest a greater audience willing to take an active role in participating in your brand's content. 

3. CPC: Short for Cost Per Click is especially relevant in paid digital marketing campaigns. It's similar to engagement rate in showing the percentage of your audience willing to take the desired action but ties itself to your marketing budget for quick and helpful evaluations of your ad and messaging efficiency.

3 Relevant Marketing Metrics in the Consideration Stage of the Marketing Funnel

In the consideration stage, audiences are already aware of your brand and product or service. Success now means identifying how many of them are willing to move closer towards becoming customers, even if they are not quite ready for the purchase yet. Sample relevant metrics include:

1. Lead Conversion Rate: The percentage of your audience converting to leads or prospects in your CRM system. Marketers measure this metric using a baseline of total website visitors or total engaged users in an ad. Industry benchmarks can help place your brand's lead conversion rate in context. 

2. CPL: Short for Cost Per Lead. CPL is closely related to the CPC metric explained above. For conversion-focused marketing campaigns, it helps to understand its effectiveness using its budget as a baseline. 

3. Funnel Velocity: The speed at which your prospects move through your marketing and sales funnel. A faster velocity suggests the effectiveness of mid-funnel messaging, whereas slower velocities may signify problems to be fixed. 

4 Relevant Marketing Metrics in the Decision Stage of the Marketing Funnel

In the lower stages of the marketing funnel, success is naturally defined by customer conversions. This is the stage most closely associated with the traditional ROI calculations. The money spent here needs to result in substantial revenue, and the example metrics are particularly relevant to achieve that goal:

1. SQL Rate: Short for Sales Qualified Lead rate, this metric measures how many of your leads become relevant enough for a final sales call or pitch. While not customers yet, qualifying your leads can help build a more efficient sales operation that focuses only on the most relevant prospective customers.

2. CAC: Short for Customer Acquisition Cost; CAC takes the total number of customers gained over a specific time frame and divides that number by direct and indirect marketing costs. More advanced marketers can limit this metric to only customers gained from marketing campaigns and only the cost of the campaigns associated with this customer.

3. ROAS: Short for Return on Ad Spend. This metric is similar to CAC but focuses on revenue instead of individual customers. It calculates how much revenue is directly attributable to ads, with the goal of a positive ratio compared to those ads’ total cost.

4. CLV: Short for Customer Lifetime Value, which calculates the average value the organization can expect from a customer over their lifespan. This metric adds helpful context to organizations planning their marketing budget and revenue using tangible returns from successful campaigns. 

Using Marketing Analytics Tools to Measure Success Effectively

While countless metrics exist to measure the success of marketing, the above ten examples are among the most relevant options to assign tangible, objective measuring sticks to each campaign. They allow marketers to track their efforts better, adjust and optimize them over time, and justify future budget investments to other stakeholders.

Of course, understanding the most relevant marketing metrics available is only the beginning. Finding the right tools to track and build reports off those marketing data points is just as important.

Here, various marketing tools are available for marketers and core stakeholders. Google Analytics, a comprehensive web analytics suite that can track anything from website traffic to lead conversions, is the most popular. Others, like Funnel.io and Supermetrics, are more focused on cross-platform KPIs. Meanwhile, data platforms like Tableau can be core tools to build visual and comparative reports.

Understanding and measuring marketing success in all iterations will become more critical. Our next article in the series will focus more closely on the metrics outlined above, including tips and tricks on tracking and interpreting them for better marketing success.