What marketing metrics do you need to be tracking?

When you think which marketing metrics are essential to track what springs to mind? Probably revenue, new vs returning customers, bounce rate and overall traffic. These are definitely important to measure but they’re one dimensional – they only give a narrow view of how your marketing efforts are performing. These five marketing metrics will give you a better insight into which marketing campaigns are working and help you identify new SEO strategies.

Customer lifetime value

The cost of attracting a new customer can jump to between five and 25 times more than retaining an existing customer, which is why it’s essential to nurture your leads. One marketing metric that will help you keep your churn rate down is your customer lifetime value.

CLV = Average value of sale X Annual purchase frequency X Average retention period

This calculation will reveal how your customers are interacting with your brand and sheds a light on which of your marketing efforts are falling short. For example, you may notice that your average sale value is strong, as is the number of purchases customers make but what’s damaging you CLV is your retention period. Now you know you need to focus on your remarketing, perhaps by upping your email marketing game. Using data for your advantage is one top habit of highly successful marketing managers.

Traffic-to-lead ratio

Your page views and unique visitor metrics indicate how your website traffic is performing generally, giving you a quick snapshot, but beyond this, they reveal no more. You need to know what proportion of visitors arrive at your site from organic traffic, direct, social media or referral because this will help you identify any problem areas with your lead generation.

If your overall traffic is steadily increasing but your traffic-to-lead ratio is suffering this indicates that one or more of your traffic sources is under performing and there potentially could be a broken page or link. Now that you’re aware of lead nurturing and are tracking which traffic sources are generating leads the obvious next step is to consider whether those leads are converting.

Lead to marketing qualified lead (MQL) ratio

Gleanster Research found that 25% of the generated leads are unqualified, and by that we mean they never intend to buy from you. An MQL, however, has actively shown an interest in buying your product or service by adding an item to their shopping cart or contacting you to request more information. You need to compare these two metrics so that you can understand the quality of leads that your traffic is generating. This is an extremely helpful marketing metric to track because it can highlight opportunities for converting leads into MQL and therefore help your prospects along the marketing funnel.

Cost per lead

Across all industries, the average cost per lead is around £156, but this metric has no real value to your company. You will start reaping the benefits of understanding your cost per lead when you use this marketing metric to compare your return on marketing investments.

CPL = Cost of generating leads / Total leads

Once you start calculating the cost per lead – also known as customer acquisition cost – for each marketing channel, this will highlight which marketing efforts are most effective. However, don’t make the mistake of neglecting a channel that has a high cost per lead without considering the value of these leads. For example, your leads from social media may cost you more but they may spend more in return.

Landing page conversion rates

7 in 10 B2B businesses use optimised landing pages to generate leads. Your landing page is where you send prospective leads to convert them into customers, it’s a transaction in itself – you provide valuable information and in exchange the visitor gives their information. For example, say you’re offering a free trial, or an eBook and all the visitor needs to gain access to these is fill out a form and therefore convert.

But to get the full picture you need to track which landing pages aren’t generating traffic or those that are attracting lots of visitors but delivering a low conversion rate. It could be that your landing pages aren’t optimised for mobile devices or you’re lacking quality content – using video on landing pages can increase conversion by 86%.

How can BMS help your marketing team?

So now you know which marketing metrics you need to track to boost your campaign performance, but do you have the right team behind you? Over the last 12 years, we’ve helped our clients find top marketing talent using our 6 step marketing recruitment assessment. Contact us to find out how you can build a marketing team that will drive long-term success.