Seven online marketing KPIs you can’t live without.

Numbers, numbers…where to start? I can’t tell you how many reporting meetings I’ve been to where someone carried on endlessly about traffic factors that had zero correlation to actual business insights.

This begs the question: which KPI’s are fundamental to measure the efficacy of my lead generation campaigns? Look no further, here’s the short list.

1. Cost Per Acquisition
   Acquisition means just that…you’ve acquired them by virtue of having made a sale. How much it cost to acquire them helps you understand not only how well your marketing spend is working for you, but more specifically, which channels or campaigns are generating the most revenue? This helps you make important budget allocation decisions.
2. Sales Revenue
   In order to determine ROMI, we need to first determine actual sales revenue. If costs for marketing exceed revenue, or if they encroach on minimum profit margins, the marketing strategy and mix need to be carefully re-evaluated.decisions.
3. Online ROMI
   By analyzing the amount of Sales Revenue attributed to each online marketing channel, you can make well-informed decisions as to where to allocated online advertising dollars. The days of simply reporting on traffic and leads are over, and tools are available to not only determine which channels brought in how much revenue, but also, which channels influenced a sale along a buyer’s journey.
4. Landing Page Conversions
   By employing either simple A/B testing, or more complex multivariate testing, we can optimize landing pages for higher conversion rates. Positioning of content, images, forms and CTAs can radically affect conversion rates. Driving traffic to a page is one thing, but improving the probability of converting traffic to leads, then customers, is an art unto itself, that is completely data-driven.
5.  SQL:MQL
   Inbound marketing efforts qualify leads as MQL (marketing qualified leads). When leads reach a predefined level of engagement, they are sent to Sales. Sales can either accept the leads and label them as SQL (sales qualified leads), and from that point, use that categorization to determine sales conversion rates. But if leads are not accepted by Sales, they should be rejected and sent back to Marketing. The number of leads provided as MQL vs the number of leads actually accepted help determine the quality of inbound leads, which help marketing prove the value of their efforts, as well as improve their strategies.
6. Cost per Lead Acquisition
   In addition to measuring Cost per Customer Acquisition, it’s important to measure the cost of the all leads, to determine if marketing spend per channel needs to be reallocated, or if campaigns need to be further optimized for higher conversions.
7. Customer Lifetime Value
   Do you know your customer churn rate? Are they dropping out sooner in the lifecycle than you had hoped? If you are not retaining customers, can you pinpoint at which stage they are dropping out? While preventing churn may be customer success, product development or pricing-related, it may also be related to marketing nurture or messaging.
   

Of course, we shouldn’t limit ourselves to a mere 7 KPIs; marketing data analytics is comprehensive and multi-faceted. We should also consider traffic sources, social media reach, traffic to lead ratio, organic vs paid traffic, and more. The metrics outlined above represent several stages in the growth process that shouldn’t be overlooked.

Thanks for reading!

by Androniki Bossonis