Spec Brief:

Here’s How to Choose the Most Important Marketing KPIs for Your Campaign

Choosing the right key performance indicators (KPIs) for your marketing function is incredibly important to ensure you’re setting and meeting (or for you high-achievers, exceeding!) goals that reflect your business’s marketing efforts. In addition, agreement upon your KPIs is crucial during the planning stage of a marketing campaign to understand how these measurable metrics change over time.

Why are Marketing KPIs Important?

Marketing KPIs are important to ensure that everyone involved and overseeing the project is harmonized on what metrics matter most before kicking off a marketing strategy. Agreement on KPIs can help shape the tactics used to implement your marketing strategy and provide many aims for the marketing team to stay laser-focused on results. Marketing KPIs also motivate the marketing team to monitor the campaign’s performance and provide real-time updates to stakeholders. Finally, using KPIs as your guideposts to success help identify what is working – and what tactics need to be tweaked — during the campaign roll-out to provide the best chances for success. 

How well you deliver on your KPIs is crucial to making a case for future marketing budgets by illustrating that any dollars spent will be used wisely and provide a return on investment. Successful KPI performance also can ensure that you keep your clients happy. The marketing KPIs you choose could differ widely depending on your overall marketing goals. 

Most-Important Marketing KPIs 

Read on for a breakdown of some of the most important KPIs in marketing and why these specific indicators are key to the hearts and minds of your boss and clients:

• Website visitors: Sometimes considered a “vanity” metric, website visitor metrics illustrate the size of awareness around your brand. Website visitor stats can help track multiple campaigns and help you better understand how your search engine listings and social media posts contribute to website conversion.

• Bounce rate: Your bounce rate is the percentage of website visitors who land a single page of your website and then leave. This metric can be hard to stomach, but it can be a helpful wake-up call to investigate if your website content is relevant enough to your target audience, mobile-friendly, and quick. Here’s a good guide to learning more about how to fix your bounce rate.

• Number of leads: The number of leads that your marketing campaign generates is an important KPI to understand the effectiveness of catching your audience’s attention, directing them to your website, and providing them with enough relevant information that they have engaged with your website’s call to action. 

• Sales-qualified leads: Sales-qualified leads, or SQLs, are more specific ways to measure leads. This measures the number of leads considered ripe for a sale, with interest in your product or service, and the financial means to become a customer.

• Sales growth: Sales growth is one of the best ways to measure your marketing strategies and provides marketing with the ability to show their “return on investment” for funds spent on marketing efforts.

These marketing KPIs are essential to understanding the success of your marketing campaign but are just the tip of the Marketing Metrics Iceberg. Depending on your strategy, many more marketing KPIs may be relevant to your campaign. Using marketing KPIs will only strengthen your strategy by integrating the lessons learned from your KPIs into the subsequent iterations of your marketing strategies.

Tell us in the comments: Which marketing KPIs have been the most important for your campaigns?