Whatever your position in the marketing team, if you are good at analyzing data, you are an undeniable asset for your company. Having accurate data will allow you to make the most relevant decisions, suggest adjustments if circumstances so require and thus improve the performance of marketing and sales services with the KPI knowledge.
Even good marketers often focus only on tracking the basics: traffic and leads. There is a whole world beyond these simple yet important indicators.
Indeed, you can analyze your data much more thoroughly to see how certain components of your strategy work together to improve marketing, learn what improvements could increase your marketing performance and avoid many and serious obstacles before they happen.
How to measure the Marketing performance?
To help or perhaps assist you to get started, here are some of the indicators and key reports to analyze if you are looking to optimize your strategy and grow your business. They will help you prove more easily marketing ROI on your marketing efforts and implement marketing campaigns tailored to your company's priorities.
Let's discover together these indicators sorted by type of objective.
Lead volume
Would not it be great to know every morning if you are still on track to surpass your month's goals regarding leads? This is exactly what a lead volume curve serves! It allows you to track your progress by visualizing goals to be achieved daily.
Throughout the month, integrate the results obtained each day to compare the figures with the final objective. If you fall behind, you will realize it from the first day and can react quickly to regain the rhythm of the KPIs.
Number of visitors
The same concept can apply to traffic, which is important if you are aiming for a specific goal regarding leads. Use a traffic volume curve to track its growth more accurately.
Again, if you fall behind, you can react quickly, for example by creating content that will attract more visitors at a higher pace. This will improve your marketing ROI.
Conversion rates from leads to customers
Do you really know or understand the average conversion rate of your leads? I advise you to study this indicator regularly, at least once a month. This figure is useful because it helps you to monitor the quality of your leads at any time. If it is high, it means that you generate leads with high potential. On the other hand, if it decreases, you probably do not attract the right people to your site or your offer is not specific enough.
Growth in the number of leads per working day, month after month
Many marketers are tracking month-to-month growth to improve marketing, but they do not always look at the growth in the average number of leads per business day, month after month. How is it different, and why is it important? Simply because the months do not have the same number of days. This indicator helps you measure growth more closely by focusing on your production on a single business day.
Want to learn more about how to advance your website and start generating leads?
Explore our Marketing Automation feature!Weekly target per channel since the beginning of the month
How do you measure the growth and progress of each channel? For example, have you decided to use social networks as a lead generation channel? Or email marketing?
Suppose your goal is to generate 100 leads through social networks in March. With the weekly lead indicator, you can set weekly goals to support your ultimate goal. It is an encrypted version of the curves mentioned above, but it is very easy to transform it into a graph.
Conversion rate per channel
Every marketer should be able to know which channels offer the best numbers in terms of acquiring new customers for their marketing ROI. SEO may bring you the biggest volume regarding lead generation, but it is possible that social networks, if they offer one of the smallest leads, nevertheless attract more customers.
How is it possible? Maybe the conversion rate of leads generated through social networks is much higher than that achieved by SEO ... so much so that the volume of leads brought by the SEO is not enough to close the gap.
Percentage of paid leads and organic leads
Many marketers pool their analyses by a channel into larger sets - for example, separating paid leads from organic leads. The "paid" group represents all the marketing to which you spend a budget (in addition to the time of your team), like Adwords, ads on social networks (Facebook ads, etc.), sponsored newsletters.
The "organic" group is the opposite: it is all leads generated without any cost, except for the time spent by your team. Blogs, SEO, social networks and email marketing all fall into this category.
Measure what percentage of your leads comes from each group to see what your organic efforts are doing and find out if you can afford to reduce your advertising campaigns!
Below are a few useful indicators to help you determine if your content brings real added value.
Leads generated by offer
One of the most sensible uses of content to improve marketing, especially premium content or long content, is to place it behind a landing page to encourage your visitors to fill out a form.
This content is often referred to as an offer because it is what you offer on this landing page. But how to know if it was worth creating this offer? It's very simple: by looking at how many people fill this specific form on the landing page of the offer.
Now that you have this figure, what is the volume of leads compared to your other offers? As soon as you know it, you will be able to determine the effectiveness of different types of offer content about your marketing efforts.
New leads per landing page
We now know what the landing page submission rate is, i.e., the fill rate of the forms on the same pages. But how can you separate the people who regularly fill these forms from newcomers? Thanks to the rate of new contacts!
This great indicator is a very useful measure to know what percentage of new prospects you are attracting to your business for marketing ROI - in other words, the rate of new unique contacts that fill your form. These numbers also allow you to assess how much your content helps you attract a new carrier audience for your sales.
Call to Action method
Let's take a step back. How do potential leads reach your landing pages, already? Ah yes! Call to Action (CTA). You know, these are the "buttons" ideally placed at the end of your blog articles, which guide visitors to the content of your landing pages.
By looking at the click-through rate of these, or the rate of visitors to a page that then clicks on the CTA on that same page, you will understand the value of this offer for incoming traffic. Do not underrate this, it’s one the best KPI tools among others.
It is also vital to note that sometimes the performance of a CTA can be optimized very simply by updating it. It is, therefore, a good idea to test CTA variations, such as color, shape, text and location (called A/B testing), before deciding to modify your entire content strategy.
Keywords bringing traffic
To know if your content creation has an impact on your results, you can also analyze the performance of relevant keywords for your business on the search engines.
Final Marketing KPI: Qualified Leads
If you are not one of those, who measures qualified leads or has not yet defined what is a Qualified Lead Marketing (QLM) for your company, here is a quick answer: a qualified lead is a very "hot" lead that needs to be processed quickly by your sales force for a better marketing ROI. You can do some search on that for better understanding; Google is our friend anytime. How does this help you? Over time, you can learn which content presents the best opportunity to convert to MQL. There you have it all; you now have a complete overview of Marketing or key Performance Indicators to monitor in your hand.
KPIs tracking is a crucial part of your marketing strategy that your sales team together with your marketing team should include in their business process and sales strategy accordingly. If you follow the tips mentioned above you will set strategic goals for sales and marketing based on key performance indicators (KPIs) and you will improve your marketing strategy.
