Top 8 Marketing KPIs You Should Keep an Eye on

Marketing is a very dynamic field, so you should try your best to keep up with every big or minute change as a marketer. In order to get the best results from your marketing efforts, you need to first and foremost know what you’re doing and how well it’s performing.

If your marketing campaign’s performance is not as good as you expected, or the amount of money you gain from it is not worth the effort, you might want to change your approach in future campaigns. Or on the contrary, if a marketing campaign is doing well, you will invest in it even more. All of this is only possible through marketing KPIs. This article will first discuss the essence of marketing KPIs and then explain the 8 best that you should start within this vast and interesting field.  

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What Are KPIs in Marketing?

KPIs, or key performance indicators, are the data that you measure to assess the overall success of your marketing attempts.

Studying these indications will help you figure out which approaches are working and which ones aren’t so that you can effectively adjust your efforts.

Marketing KPIs are statistics that should be tracked on a regular basis to determine how well marketing activities are performing and whether they are contributing to the achievement of KPIs and business objectives.

What Are The Best Marketing KPIs?

There are countless KPIs for marketing, and almost all of them can be used in specific situations, but you don’t necessarily need to calculate all of them at the beginning.

Deep understanding and proper analysis of a handful of very important digital marketing KPIs can be of greater help to you than mindlessly calculating every marketing KPI that exists.

Below we explain some examples of KPIs in marketing that are undoubtedly among the top.

1. Return on Investment (ROI)

Return on investment, or ROI, is a metric for determining how much income a marketing campaign generates in comparison to the expenses of maintaining the campaign. 

It’s logical to avoid spending your marketing budget on an inefficient campaign. Calculating your ROI helps you figure out where you should spend your marketing money to obtain the best outcome. If the ROI for one of your campaigns is 9% while the other’s is 45%, you will obviously invest your money in the second campaign that generates more profit.

ROI is definitely one of, if not the most, important marketing KPIs. The formula for calculating the return on investment (ROI) is as follows:

The formula for ROI (Return on Investment)

ROI = Profit / Investment × 100

2. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

Customer acquisition cost is the cost of all the steps needed in persuading a potential consumer to make a purchase. CAC covers expenditures associated with less obvious phases like the research process, as well as the costs of marketing. You can assess which paths are the most economical for your budget by understanding how much each new visitor costs you to convert.

The formula for calculating the return on investment (CAC) is as follows:

The formula for CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost)

CAC = Sales and marketing costs / New customers

3. Traffic-to-Lead Ratio

Traffic-to-lead (also called visitor-to-lead) ratio is the proportion of your visitors who become interested in doing business with you and become potential customers.

Analyzing the traffic can be tricky because, in some cases, the traffic you are receiving is at a reasonable rate, so you might think to yourself that everything is going great. But what you might not be aware of is that although you’re receiving good traffic, the number of visitors who become leads is decreasing day by day. By calculating the traffic-to-lead ratio, you can make sure that this is not the case with your business.

If you are experiencing a decline in your traffic-to-lead ratio, you have to consider analyzing your customer behavior with tools such as WatchThemLive to pinpoint the problem. Features such as heatmaps and session recording are great ways of finding and solving these types of issues.

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4. Lead-to-Customer Ratio

The lead-to-customer ratio (also the sales conversion rate or lead conversion rate) is the percentage of qualified leads that successfully convert and finalize their purchase. This ratio is crucial for determining how well a company’s sales funnel is doing.

5. Customer Retention Rate

Keeping current customers costs way less than finding new ones. The ratio of current customers who stay with you after a certain time is known as the customer retention rate. Your customer retention rate may aid in understanding what keeps consumers coming back to your brand and can also indicate areas where customer service could be improved. You may try to enhance your customer retention rate after knowing how effectively or poorly your company maintains consumers.

The formula for calculating the customer retention rate is as follows:

The formula for customer retention rate

Customer retention rate = (Number of customers at the end of a period – Number of the new customers during the period) / Number of customers at the beginning of a period 

6. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

Customer lifetime value is an estimation of a company’s profitability throughout the course of its relationship with each individual customer. Enhancing the customer lifetime value helps you to keep a connection with your consumers, minimize disengagement, and improve satisfaction. It also aids in the calculation of a realistic customer acquisition cost.

This marketing KPI is important since, as we mentioned, acquiring new customers is costly; therefore, if you produce more profit from your current customers, you can decrease your costs for acquiring new customers.

The formula for calculating the customer retention rate is as follows:

The formula for CLV (Customer Lifetime Value)

CLV = Average order value × Purchase frequency / Average customer lifetime

7. Organic Traffic

Organic traffic refers to users that visit your site from non-paid channels such as search engines like Google, Bing, or Yahoo.

Since organic searches are naturally purposeful, organic traffic has higher conversion rates than paid traffic. Moreover, organic traffic has a far higher return on investment than paid traffic, and it also enhances website trust.

The most important way to increase your organic traffic is through search engine optimization (SEO). This SEO starter guide can be beneficial if you’re a beginner in this field.

8. Social Media Traffic

The ability to track social media ROI is crucial for evaluating the effectiveness of an online marketing plan. All of your social media activities should be measurable so that you can analyze their performance and adjust your future plans accordingly.

You should keep track of various KPIs in your social media pages, such as impressions, audience growth rate, average engagement rate, click-through rate (CTR), and many more.

Conclusion

It’s rather obvious that it’s not possible to improve your marketing campaigns’ performance without being able to measure it. Measuring marketing KPIs is an essential part of marketing that enables you to evaluate the result of your activities and estimate future events.

This article explained the meaning of marketing KPIs and went through 8 marketing KPI examples that are necessary to keep track of even for the smallest efforts. 


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Cyrus Nambakhsh
Cyrus Nambakhsh
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