Must-Have Marketing KPIs and How to Measure Them

Marketing teams today cover a wide span of responsibilities and skillsets. So you need to make sure your reporting covers all the important marketing metrics you need to to track your campaigns, partnerships, and overall marketing efforts success.

We've outlined some of the must-have marketing KPIs and metrics you and your team need to achieve and measure success:

• Marketing KPIs for Comms Teams

• Marketing KPIs for Digital Marketers

• Marketing KPIs for Customer Marketing

Must-Have Marketing KPIs and How to Measure Them

Due to the diversity of roles in marketing we’ve grouped them into three broadly defined job functions:

1. Comms
2. Digital
3. Customer marketing

Tip: Learn more about the differences between marketing and PR and explore PR metrics

What's the difference between a metric and a KPI?

While these terms are often used interchangeably, they have different meanings.

Metric: A metric tracks activity and actions over a period of time. For example "100 likes on Instagram posts in one week".

KPI: KPI stands for key performance indicator. This is a measurement tied to a business goal. For example, you determine success on Instagram as "150 likes on Instagram per week", and your weekly metrics show how you're pacing against that goal.

Tip: Learn more about campaign measurement in general.

Marketing KPIs for Comms Teams

This area includes roles like content, PR, and social. Goals for these roles frequently center around eyeballs. 👀

Here are the marketing KPIs that let communications folks know whether they are reaching their audience effectively and what they should focus on to increase engagement.

What are content marketer KPIs?

• Unique visitors to blog: the number of people who visited content you’ve posted in a given time period
• Social shares of blog content: number of times content was shared on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.
• Average time-on-page for blog posts: this metric tracks the amount of time visitors spends on a page. The average time metric is a crucial part of determining a person’s engagement and interest in an article.
• Average Page Scroll: page scroll tracking is also critical when calculating engagement. Speed of scroll as well as the time spent on page combined are valuable quantitative metrics. Don't assume that because someone scrolled 75 percent of the page they were engaged. How fast did they scroll through 75 percent of the page? Could they have read and/or viewed the content in that time?
• Blog traffic as a percentage of site traffic: the percentage of people who visit the website who land on a blog page
• Returning visitors to blog: people coming to the blog who have previously been tagged as having been on the site

Tip: Learn more about the content marketing metrics you need to measure.

What metrics should a PR specialist track?

• Active coverage: coverage secured by the PR team
• Share of voice: percentage of coverage compared to competitors
• Potential reach: sum of viewership for publications and websites your coverage is featured in
• Sentiment: tone of articles published
• Advertising value equivalency: how much it would cost to generate the same number of impressions through ads

Tip: Learn more about PR metrics.

What are some key social media marketer KPIs?

• Managed audience size: number of followers, both per channel and overall
• Total engagement: shares, comments, likes, retweets, replies, direct messages, etc.
• Engagement rate: number of people who actively engaged with your posts (shares, likes, etc) divided by your total number of followers per channel
• Sentiment: tone of articles published and social media posts
• Average engagement per post: the number of times a random post will be shared, on average

Tip: Take a look at the most important social media metrics and learn how to measure social media campaign success.

KPIs for Digital Marketers

These marketing team members, including marketing ops, search engine optimizers (SEOs), conversion rate optimizers (or sometimes acquisition managers), and others are likely more data-focused. 📈

Tracking the number of bookings attributable to digital marketing is their ultimate goal.

Reading Tip: How To Measure the Effectiveness of a Digital Marketing Campaign

What are some KPIs for marketing ops managers?

• Raw inquiries: these equate to someone raising their hand saying they’re interested in what you do — blog subscription, e-book download, webinar registration, etc.
• Marketing qualified leads (MQLs): these are leads fit to be sent to the sales team
• Sales accepted leads (SALs): leads accepted by the sales team as ready to be followed up on
• Sales qualified leads (SQLs): leads that are recognized as actual opportunities, moving them from the top of the waterfall into the sales cycle
• Conversion rate between stages: percentage of the people in each stage above who move on to the next stage, including SALs to bookings

What metrics should a web marketer track?

• Overall visits: total number of visits to the site during a certain time period; if one person visits twice, it counts as two
• Unique visitors: total number of people who visited the site during a certain time period; if one person visits twice, it counts as one
• Visits per channel: the number of visits from specific channels, like referral, paid search (PPC), social, email, etc.
• Website conversions: number of raw inquiries coming from the website during a certain time period, broken out by acquisition channel
• Cost per conversion: a PPC metric that tracks the average amount you pay to receive one conversion over a certain period of time
• Engagement: Every article on a website should be assigned an engagement score that is calculated in a transparent manner. Content owners need to understand how it was calculated just as much as advertisers do. Ideally, engagement will be calculated using three core metrics: average time, average page scroll, and CTR. These are the best indicators of a visitors engagement on your site.

What are important KPIs for SEO specialists?

• Traffic from organic search: number of visits over a certain period of time that reached the website from a search engine, such as Google
• Page Rank: a Google metric that uses an algorithm to determine the importance of any given webpage, based on the quantity and quality of inbound links pointing at that page
• Domain authority: a metric created by SEO software company Moz to predict how well a website will rank on search engines, using a logarithmic, 100-point scale
• Rank increase to target keywords: improvement in search engine result page rank, over time, for specific search queries that were determined in advance
• Conversions from organic search: sophisticated setups can track leads from their source all the way through the marketing funnel — this tracks those who converted via organic search

Reading Tips: How to Write SEO Optimized Content, YouTube SEO Tips: How to Optimize Your Videos for Search, SEO Mistakes That Kill Content Marketing

What metrics are important for acquisition managers?

• Number of A/B tests run: to incentivize continuous improvement, set a benchmark for the number of tests run during the quarter
• Test success rate: the percentage of tests that led to a positive result — an increase in whichever metric you were tracking
• Traffic increase from testing: the amount of traffic gained in the month following a test, compared to the same period before the test was run
• Conversion increase from testing: since tests are designed to improve conversions, track the increase in conversions from the winning variation
• Bookings increase from testing: tracking bookings in a similar way will show that you’re not only increasing lead quantity, but lead quality as well

Marketing KPIs for Customer Marketing

This group might have the most interesting marketing KPIs of all. The customer marketing team normally has a singular focus on growth within the existing customer base. 🤝

Along with the KPIs listed below, the customer marketer might also want to add case studies and customer quotes, brand advocates, or average customer lifetime value to the goals they measured on.

What are key metrics for customer marketing managers?

• Net promoter score: a metric built from survey responses, where a ten-point scale is used to determine the likelihood of a customer referring business to you:
  0–6 = Detractor
  7–8 = Neutral
  9–10 = Promoter
  Subtract the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters to arrive at the net promoter score.
• Up-sell: when a customer who has a license to product A buys additional features of that product
• Cross-sell: when a customer who has a license to product A buys a license to product B
• Gross churn: there are a few ways to calculate this. The first is to take the percentage of customers up for renewal who do not renew. The second is to take the money brought in from renewals and divide by the total amount of money that renewals could generate in the month (renewal base).
• Net churn: this represents the gross churn number, except net of up-sells, which brings the number down significantly, sometimes into the negative

The Best Tools for Measuring Marketing Metrics & KPIs

There are dozens upon dozens of ways that marketing teams can choose to measure and report on their metrics, but not all are created equal.

We have listed the best marketing campaign measurement tools on the market for you.

Using a full service suite like Meltwater is ensures accuracy and saves you time when it comes to gathering all of this quantitative information into a shareable and digestible reports.

Request a demo by filling out the form below to get started!