The 10 marketing KPIs to follow

We all agree, in-depth data analysis is essential for a business.

By regularly monitoring your KPIs you can identify areas where you are strong and where you need to improve. The marketing objective: improve your business results and obtain a higher ROI.

But where do you start? Which KPIs should you focus on? Because yes, not all are equal.

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Marketing KPIs: mistakes to avoid

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Nobody is perfect, especially when it comes to marketing KPIs, so here are the mistakes to avoid:

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👉 Choose KPIs that are not aligned with your business goals

Avoid selecting goals that are disconnected from your business goals.

For example, if you're looking to increase customer satisfaction, look at KPIs like the NPS score or customer recommendations.

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👉 Opt for marketing indicators that are difficult to measure

‍💰 A golden rule: your marketing KPIs should be:

• Easy to measure
• Precise
• Regularly measurable

If your goal is to increase sales, a good KPI would be the number of monthly sales.

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👉 Select irrelevant KPIs

Choose indicators that clearly reflect the results you want.

For example, to increase brand awareness, track impressions and reach rather than conversions or clicks.

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👉 Track too many metrics

Too many KPIs complicate interpretation and reporting.

Ask yourself these questions to select the most relevant ones:

• What do I want my target audience to do?
• What is the expected impact and engagement of my ads campaign?
• How am I going to analyze performance?
• How do you know if the goals are being met?

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What marketing KPIs should you track and measure?

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Not all performance indicators need to be established. Moreover, combining KPIs is not a recommended strategy. At Growth Room, our approach to key KPIs takes into account two important elements:

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1 ️ ※ Match the right indicators according to the conversion funnel

2 ️ — Aligning marketing KPIs with business goals

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Match the right KPIs based on the conversion funnel

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To properly assess your marketing campaigns, you need to choose the right metrics for each stage of the conversion funnel.

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👉 Top of the funnel

At this stage, your potential customers are discovering your business for the first time. Here are some KPIs to measure brand awareness:

• Number of prints
• Ranking one or more sales or content pages in search results (SERP)
• Non-branded searches

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👉 Middle of the funnel

Here, visitors already know your brand and are interested in what you offer (on your website, social networks...). KPIs to measure interest include:

• Number of clicks
• Click-through rate (CTR)
• New users
• Branded searches

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👉 Bottom of the funnel

At this phase, prospects are ready to take action (purchase, subscription, quote request, etc.). The KPIs to measure consideration and conversion are:

• Pages per session
• Average time on site
• Micro-conversions
• Conversions
• Conversion rate
• Revenue generated
• Average order value (AOV)

By aligning the right metrics at each stage of the funnel, you can illustrate how prospects progress from awareness to interest to conversion.

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Aligning KPIs with business goals

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A simple online search for “performance indicators to follow” or “essential inbound marketing KPIs” will give you thousands of results: from traffic to the number of leads, including the opening rate. The catch is that these vanity metrics have no value if they are simply added to a dashboard without context.

For example, the number of visitors to your site (traffic) means nothing without other metrics. Having a lot of visitors without conversions doesn't produce any concrete results for your business. What matters is the quality of visitors and the effectiveness of your content.

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10 marketing KPIs to track that are much more effective than traffic or the number of leads

Attributed Revenue to Marketing

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This key performance indicator measures the overall impact of marketing on gross revenue.

To calculate this indicator accurately, you will need modern marketing analytics that can combine data from your campaigns with data from CRM system of your business.

Concretely, this allows you to optimize your efforts based on MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads), SQL (Sales Qualified Leads), orders concluded and revenues.

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Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs)

Market-qualified leads (MQLs) are leads that marketing has identified as being more likely to become customers than other leads. This identification is based on actions and behaviors that indicate an interest in buying the products or services you offer, such as trying out a demo of your software or downloading an ebook.

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Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs)

Sales qualified leads (SQLs) are leads that the sales team has reviewed and identified as being very interested in buying the products or services you offer. This identification is based on actions such as requesting a quote, purchase information or a live demonstration and/or profile information such as industry, company size, and lead role.

To learn more about the Difference between MQL and SQL, read our article on the subject.

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Organic traffic and leads

Organic traffic refers to visitors who come to your website from organic search results. Organic leads represent the number of leads that are attributed to your organic traffic. Tracking organic visitors and leads helps you understand your efforts by SEO and your global reputation.

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LTV or Life Time Value

This is the point where the three previous metrics converge, representing the average expected revenue of each customer. It reflects the present value of a customer's future net profit over the duration of the relationship. This essential KPI helps you determine the long-term value of each customer and the net value generated after taking into account the customer acquisition cost.

Knowing your customers' LTV allows you to better target and optimize your marketing actions and loyalty efforts to maximize profits. This helps you estimate how much you can invest to gain market share.

👉 LTV calculation: iThere are several methods for calculating LTV, here is one:LTV = (Average Purchase Value × Gross Margin × Purchase Frequency × Customer Lifespan)

🔴 Important : like any marketing indicator, LTV can vary according to your customer segments. It is therefore useful to have an average global vision as well as a detailed approach by segment.

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Customer acquisition cost (CAC)

The CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) represents the sum of marketing and commercial investments necessary to acquire new customers.

👉 CAC calculation:CAC = (Marketing costs + Commercial costs)/Number of new customers

The CAC is a key indicator to assess the viability of your business model. It helps you prioritize your budget and understand the break-even point of your offer.

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The LTV/CAC ratio

This ratio answers a simple question: Does the customer earn more (LTV) than what it costs to acquire (CAC)?

It is a profitability indicator that measures a customer's ROI over their entire lifespan. Monitoring this ratio is crucial to assess the performance of your marketing actions.

👉 Ratio < 1 : The company destroys value with each new customer.

👉 Ratio ≥ 3 : Encouraging indicator, showing good profitability.

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The Net Promoter Score (NPS)

The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a key indicator for measuring customer satisfaction and loyalty. It assesses the propensity of customers to recommend a brand, product, or service. A simple calculation makes it possible to measure customer satisfaction and loyalty at a given moment, while monitoring the evolution of their relationship with the brand.

NPS is essential for predicting the future of your business. It offers a measure of customer experience, satisfaction, and loyalty. Satisfied customers (promoters) are more likely to recommend your business, contributing to its growth.

Another advantage is that NPS provides an overview of the strengths and weaknesses of your business. Analyzing customer feedback provides valuable information about what you're doing well and what you can improve on.

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The conversion rate

The conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who perform a desired action on your website, such as:

• Sign up for a demo (lead generation)
• Make a purchase
• Download a resource protected by a form (white paper)

Increasing conversion rates is a key goal in growth marketing. This metric allows you to experiment with various approaches, such as improving the user experience (UX), engagement and campaign performance, to better understand the interests of Internet users.

🔴 Important: In sales, the conversion rate marks the moment when a prospect becomes a customer. This indicator is essential because it influences your CAC, your strategy and your competitiveness. Well analyzed, it reveals the blocking points in the prospect's journey (conversion or sales funnel).

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Sales Velocity

Are you wondering how your marketing and sales teams contribute directly to profitability? The speed of the sales process can help answer this question.

Concretely, it makes it possible to predict the revenues generated over a period of time by taking into account four key metrics:

• Average amount of opportunities in euros
• Sales cycle length
• Number of deals in your pipeline
• Percentage of chances of winning the opportunity

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👉 Sales velocity calculation (V):

‍Sales Velocity = (Number of Opportunities × Average Deal Value × Percentage of Chances of Winning)/Sales Cycle Length

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💬 Example:

• Average amount of opportunities: €10,000
• Sales cycle length: 90 days
• Number of deals in the pipeline (qualified leads, SQL): 30
• Percentage of chances of winning: 10%

Sales velocity = (30 × 10,000 × 10%)/90Which gives a sales velocity of €333 per day.

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👀 Why is sales velocity important?

3 of the 4 metrics used in this calculation are based on opportunities won, which means you're using your historical data to assess your business performance. By adjusting either of these parameters, you can stimulate growth.

For example, generating more leads may be beneficial, but you could get the same results. by increasing your conversion rate or the average amount of opportunities, which is often more scalable.

Segmenting by sources, audiences or customer cohorts also makes it possible to identify the most effective marketing channels and to invest more in them to maximize results.

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📣 Our tip to finish? Watch out for Vanity metrics ! This data that flatters the ego by presenting a good image of your business, but it does not have an impact on performance or real growth: it is not usable. In reality, they do not make it possible to effectively analyze the performance of an action or to optimize marketing and commercial efforts.

In short, as you can see, marketing KPIs are essential indicators that help businesses assess and optimize their marketing strategy. It is crucial to define these indicators in advance and to select the appropriate KPIs based on business goals.

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