Measuring KPIs (key performance indicators) is without a doubt one of the best ways to implement an effective marketing strategy. Marketing key performance indicators (KPIs) are used by businesses of all sizes to measure their marketing results.

There are many marketing KPIs that can help you easily measure your business operations. Marketing KPIs help you make decisions and evaluate your marketing data in a more organized and informative way.

As an entrepreneur, you need to make sure you are making the right decisions based on data. The right data helps you make the right decisions at the right time so that your online business can move in the right direction.

In this guide, we’ll look at what marketing KPIs are, why they’re so important, and which KPIs you should be tracking to effectively understand and analyze the results of your marketing campaigns.

What Is a KPI in Marketing?

A key performance indicator (KPI) in marketing is a measurable value tied to specific objectives that marketers use to assess progress toward a business goal. In other words, KPIs are a useful way to set expectations and prove that your marketing efforts are having a positive impact.

KPIs show performance related to specific projects and campaigns. While marketing metrics are numbers that need to be tracked on an ongoing basis to understand the status of marketing campaigns and whether they are contributing to KPIs and business goals.

Why Are KPIs in Marketing Important?

Without KPIs, it is difficult to conduct a marketing strategy and evaluate your results. KPIs in marketing are important because they help you in the following cases:

• Help you define your marketing goals and objectives.
• Helps you monitor the health of your business
• Allows you to measure progress over time.
• To make adjustments and stay on track.
• Gives you good information to solve problems and get better results.

Main Marketing KPI Categories

Marketing KPIs can be divided into six main categories:

• Website & traffic
• Lead generation
• SEO optimization
• Email 
• Social media
• Paid advertising

30 Best KPIs to measure for a successful marketing strategy

There are dozens of KPIs (key performance indicators) in the marketing field.  The types of marketing KPIs you should track will vary based on the type of campaign you’re running and the goals you’ve set.

Here is a list of the most commonly used and valuable KPIs in marketing.

Website Traffic

1. Website Traffic

Your website traffic refers to the total number of people who visit your website.

There is generally two types of site traffic:

• Organic Site Traffic:  Organic site traffic is the amount of traffic sent to a website through organic search.
• Referral Site Traffic:  Referral site traffic is the amount of traffic sent to a website via links on other websites.

Read more: Top 10 Strategies to Increase Organic Traffic to Your Site

2. Average Session on the Website

This is the average amount of time a visitor spends on your website during a single visit. This metric is especially important for organic search traffic, as Google ranks pages based on their relevance.

The higher the average session on your site, the more likely you are to rank well in search results and convert more visitors into leads.

To improve the average session on your website:

• Provide more compelling and useful content,
• Add more information to your pages.
• Supplement your landing pages with colorful images for organized, easy-to-read text.

3. Pageviews Per Session

This is the average number of website pages a visitor views during each visit.

4. Bounce Rate

This KPI measures the number of visitors who arrive at your site and leave without navigating to another page on your site.

Keep your bounce rate as low as possible.

Read more: 10 Ways to Reduce Your Bounce Rate

5. Click-through rate (CTR) on web pages

Click-through rate (CTR) is a term used in digital marketing that refers to the percentage of people who visit a web page from an advertisement or an organic search result.

The click-through rate, therefore, measures how well an ad has captured the interest of a site visitor. A high click-through rate generates more traffic per impression and indicates a good ranking of your website or ad in a Google SERP (search engine results page).

The click-through rate is an indicator that, combined with other KPIs, can indicate the success of your campaign. A high click-through rate can also indicate an increase in conversions.

On the other hand, a low CTR indicates that the target audience is not encouraged to click on the ads and visit the landing page to perform the desired action.

A high average CTR that is not accompanied by a good conversion rate is not always a sign of success as it can actually mean that the ad campaign was not successful in attracting people who are more likely to convert.

To calculate the click-through rate, we divide the number of times an ad or web page is clicked by the number of impressions and multiply it by 100.

The equation is as follows:

Let’s say an online ad was clicked 100 times after being viewed 2,000 times. (100 clicks / 2,000 impressions) x 100% = CTR of 5%.

To improve your CTR:

• Use links to connect different landing pages, blog articles, and case studies. 
• Create CTA messages that make people want to click on these.

6. Customer Retention Rate (CRR)

Customer retention rate (CRR) is the percentage of customers from a given time period who return to your website and purchase. It is a KPI that shows the health of your business and an important number to track.

A high retention rate should therefore be a key element of your business strategy. Indeed, finding new customers takes a lot of time and effort, while it is much cheaper to keep an existing customer happy and continue selling to them.

To calculate your RRC:

• Determine the number of customers you have at the end of a given period (week, month, or quarter).
•  Subtract the number of new customers you acquired during that period.
• Divide it by the number of customers you had at the beginning of that period. 
• Then multiply that number by one hundred.

7. Website Conversion Rate

 The most important thing about your visited page is that it converts and directs paid traffic to your site. Google Analytics gives you an excellent overview of every page’s conversion rate.

To improve your Website conversion rate:

• Test out things that could improve your landing pages’ conversion rate
• Change the CTA, add images, or change bits of text.

Read more:  Conversion Rate Optimization Best Practices

Lead Generation

8. New Leads/Prospects

A new lead can be someone signing up for a free trial or creating an account on your online retail site. This metric indicates the number of new leads acquired in the past month.

To improve the number of new leads:

• Increase the budget of cost-per-click ad campaigns.
  
• Create SEO-optimized content to be found through search engines.
• Try new temporary discount offers.

Read more: 16 Top Lead Generation Strategies to Grow Your Business

9. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

Customer lifetime value is the total value of a customer to a company over the duration of their relationship.

Customer lifetime value is a metric that all businesses should consider when measuring profitability and planning for future growth.

This marketing metric is crucial, especially when it comes to adjusting campaigns and allocating resources to different marketing channels.

By comparing your customer lifetime value (CLV) to your cost per conversion (CPC), you will know if your marketing activities are justified.

 If the CPC is higher than the average customer lifetime value, you are losing money instead of increasing your revenue.

To calculate lifetime value, multiply the average value of a sale by the average number of transactions and the average customer retention time.

For example, if your company’s average sale is $100 and your company’s profit margin, after calculating the cost of goods sold (COGS), marketing, overhead, and all other expenses, is 20%, and the average customer buys from you four times a year for two years, the lifetime value of that customer is calculated as follows:

   Customer lifetime value: $100 × 20% x 4 × 2 = $160

Companies should implement strategies to increase the lifetime value of the customer, especially since the cost of optimizing the lifetime value and retention of an existing customer is significantly lower than the cost of acquiring a new customer.

 According to a Bain & Company study, in financial services, for example, a 5% increase in retention produces more than 25% profit. [1]

One of the best ways to increase customer lifetime value is to offer better and cheaper products or services than competitors. But not all companies have this privilege and can achieve a price point well below the competition.

So they implement tactics to improve operational efficiency and impress customers with targeted, personalized, and relevant communication.

 Measure your customer lifetime value (CLV) from month to month to see if average transaction size and customer lifetime are staying the same or increasing/decreasing.

10. Conversion Rate

The conversion rate is a percentage point that shows the number of conversions divided by the number of people who visited your website.

Conversion rate is essential to measuring the success of your marketing efforts. The ultimate goal of your business is of course to increase sales, so tracking sales is a key indicator of your marketing performance that you should not lose sight of.

A conversion happens when a user takes a desired action:

• Makes a purchase
• Clicks a link
• Fills out a form
• Opens an email
• Calls a phone number

Or perform an action you wanted to. Your conversion rate is, in fact, the percentage of people you convert by performing each of these actions.

Tracking your conversion rates at each stage of the marketing and sales process helps you identify what’s working and what’s not, so you can continually refine your marketing strategy.

11. Cost per Conversion(CPC)

Cost per conversion(CPC) is a marketing KPI that shows how much it costs to acquire leads to convert them into paying customers.

It’s useful to track this metric and calculate the cost of the time and resources you spent on a lead acquisition source, such as an Adwords campaign, blog content, social media, etc.

To get an accurate measure of cost per conversion, track different marketing channels separately. That way, you’ll find the most valuable lead sources and can focus your energy and resources on amplifying the reach of those channels.

You can leverage customer relationship management (CRM) tools to see how many leads from a particular source have converted to paying customers since entering your sales funnel.

By dividing the total cost of a lead source by the number of conversions, you can find out how much it cost you to acquire a new customer. To generate benefits from your digital marketing strategy, your cost per conversion must be lower than your customer lifetime value.

To lower your cost per conversion:

• Create highly targeted marketing campaigns
• Improve the user experience of your service or product,
• provide help documents and installation guides.

12. Number of Leads

The number of leads is obviously the most relevant KPI in a lead generation context. In marketing terms, a lead is any person or entity potentially interested in your product or service.

The definition of a lead varies from company to company. if for your company a lead is a person who fills out a registration form, the number of leads is the total number of people who found your product interesting enough to register.

Leads, which have the potential to become a paying customer, can be classified into three groups:

• Marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) are those who have shown interest in a brand.
• Sales-accepted leads (SAL) is a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) that has been reviewed and passed to the sales team for approval.
• Sales-qualified leads (SQL) are those who have shown interest in purchasing a brand. SQL is considered to be a potential customer, which allows them to be given special attention and moved forward in the sales cycle.

Tracking the number of qualified leads shows whether your marketing campaigns are actually focused on targeted prospects or whether they are simply generating traffic that does not match your potential audience.

To increase your lead generation, you need to spend your energy on the right prospects and be able to reach them effectively, so that your sales increase accordingly.

13. Cost per Lead (CPL)

Cost-per-lead (CPL) shows the cost of acquiring a new prospect.

To measure your cost per lead (CPL), you need to take stock of the time, resources, and money spent on marketing activities and compare the results to the number of monthly leads.

To improve your cost per lead (CPL):

• Create and share quality content on social media to get free website traffic and new leads.
• Identify which types of free and paid campaigns work best for you and increase the budget and time spent.

The cost per lead (CPL), complemented by the cost per conversion(CPC) KPI, allows you to assess whether various marketing activities are profitable.

14. Average Time of Conversion

Tracking the Average time it takes to convert prospects into paying users shows how effective your sales process is. If your Average time of conversion is too long, it might be because your prospects don’t find your service or product interesting enough and end up being attracted by your competitors.

To calculate the average time between the acquisition of a lead and its transformation into a paying customer, you can use a CRM tool.

To decrease the conversion time of your leads:

• Offer time-limited discount offers.
• Provide useful tips throughout the buying process.
• Use remarketing ads to remind your prospects of your product.

15. Email List Growth Rate

Email list growth rate is another important marketing KPI that deserves special attention. You need to calculate the growth rate of your email list.

Read more:  Email Marketing Beginner’s Ultimate Guide

16. Email Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is the percentage of emails sent that did not reach your subscribers’ inboxes.

By measuring bounce rate versus open rate, you’ll get a more accurate idea of the quality of your subscriber lists. If your bounce rate is high, your list may be filled with bogus email addresses, old addresses, or addresses with errors.

To preemptively reduce your bounce rates you can require double opt-in, which asks subscribers to verify their email address and confirm that they want to receive emails from your brand. This is a great way to have higher quality email lists and lower bounce rates.

17. Email Open Rate

Email Open Rate is the percentage of e-mail recipients who open your e-mail. The open rate is the simplest KPI in e-mail marketing and is essential to understand how your subscribers receive your messages. The open rate tells you how many subscribers opened the email you sent.

Open rates can give you insight into the success of your subject line.

18. Email Click-Through Rate (CTR)

Email click-through rate CTR is a metric that measures the number of people who click on an email relative to the number of emails sent. Essentially, the click-through rate is a percentage that tells you how many emails managed to get a click from a subscriber.

Email click-through rate (CTR) tells you if your campaign was engaging enough to get not only an open but also action from your audience. The main purpose of tracking CTR is to measure engagement.

19. Email Conversion Rate

Email Conversion Rate is the percentage of subscribers who perform the desired action in your email campaign. Your email campaign goal may be to get your subscribers to download a resource, purchase a product, or sign up for a service. 

SEO

(Search Engine Optimization)

There are many variables at play in an SEO campaign, but SEO KPIs focus primarily on organic traffic and highly targeted lead acquisition. Because organic traffic from search engines is one of the most profitable channels of access for digital marketers.

Here are the major SEO KPIs

20. Search Rankings

Search ranking is one of the most commonly used PKIs in marketing. Good placement on search engine results pages (SERPs) is crucial because it directly correlates to your SEO success.  The higher your website ranks for relevant keywords, the better.

When people search on Google, they rarely make it to the second page of results. According to a Backlinco study, the position #1 result in Google’s organic search results has an average CTR of 31.7% and is 10 times more likely to receive a click than a position #10.

Getting the best search positions, allows you to be on the verge of achieving other goals such as traffic, leads, and conversions. It is also important to track your rankings for the right keywords.

Keywords that attract a remarkably high number of targeted people can also have a high conversion rate. Your goal should be to find those high converting keywords and create content to rank high in the SERPs for all of those keywords.

To measure your keywords Ranking you can use different SEO tools, such as Jaaxy.

To improve your keywords Ranking :

• create quality content and include variations of the same keyword on your website.
• Link to other relevant pages on your web page to build an entire network of interlinked content.
• Supplement your old content with links to the new page using many variations of keywords in the linked text.
• Research your competitors’ best-ranking keywords to get new ideas for your SEO strategy.
• Find ways to get new inbound links from websites with high page authority.

Read more:

SEO For Beginners: How To Optimize Your Blog Posts For SE  

  80 Best Free SEO Tools

   4 Best Keyword Research Tips to Improve Your Ranking

21. Inbound Links to a Website

Inbound links, which are also called backlinks, are links from other sites back to your site. Search engines use links to determine the relevance and authority of a web page for a given search.

For a link to be considered a backlink by search engines, it must be clickable. Backlinks can also indicate if you are considered an industry expert in a certain field.

So to secure backlinks, try to:

• Establish your brand as an industry expert to be included in articles and reports.
• Creating informative, interesting, and link-worthy content is a good way to build links to your website.
• Guest blogging is also a method of getting backlinks from blogs to your own website by writing blogs for other websites.
• Quality links from pages with high rankings bring you value.

To measure your backlinks, you can use SEO tools such as SEMrush and see all the inbound links to your website.

The number of inbound links shows if your content is being shared on other sites.

Read more: Content Marketing and Inbound Marketing, Two Complementary Strategies

22. Domain Authority and Page authority

Domain authority and page authority are influenced by the number of links to your domain and the authority of those links. They measure the trust related to your domain and your pages.

Measuring domain authority is critical to the effectiveness of your link building because your backlinks increase the amount of trust that search engines place in your domain.

“Domain Authority is difficult to influence directly. It is made up of an aggregate of metrics and link data that have an impact on the authority score. This was done intentionally; this metric is meant to approximate how competitive a given site is in Google search results. Since Google takes a lot of factors into account, a metric that tries to calculate it must incorporate a lot of factors as well.”^[1]

You can monitor your Domain Authority with SEO tools such as Moz or Moz’s browser extension.

To improve your domain authority and page authority try to:

• Getting backlinks from authoritative sites.
• Create high-value content.
• Improve your overall SEO.
• Ensure that all of your pages link to each other on your website

Social Media

23. Traffic from Social Media

Social site traffic is the amount of traffic sent to a website via social media sites. Monitor this social media KPI as a percentage of all visits and track the monthly trend to understand the importance of different channels to your website traffic.

To measure traffic from social media, use Google Analytics reports to get a free overview of your website’s traffic sources.

To improve traffic from social media:

• Acquire a large number of followers,
• Share interesting posts,
• Create social media campaigns to increase awareness and get likes, shares, and followers.

24. Social Media Engagement

Engagement is, arguably, the KPI you need to worry about on social media because It is the catalyst for improving all other social media KPIs.

Engagement tells you how much your fans or followers are actively interacting with your brand on social media. You can measure it by the number of likes, shares, comments, and followers.

The KPI you can measure vary by social media platform, but generally include the following:

•  Clicks: Clicks on links reflect the quality of the title and image of your post.
•  Likes: More likes also signal to most platform algorithms that this particular piece of content deserves a higher ranking in search results.
•  Social Shares: Social shares represent the number of times a piece of content has been shared on major social media sites. Shares are a great indication of the quality of your work because when someone shares your post they are making a personal recommendation to their friends, colleagues, and family.
•  Comments: This is an important metric that dies the success of your content with your audience because if your content is interesting and relevant it sparks a conversation.
•  Brand mentions: Tags or mentions show that people are having a conversation about your brand. This is another social media KPI that really focuses on your relevance, as it shows that you are maintaining your brand awareness in people’s minds.
• Profile Visits: Many social media sites are used as search engines for brand research. People who are just starting to get interested in your business will definitely visit your profile. This metric is not as important as the others, as you can’t really measure purchase intent, but profile visits indicate interest in your brand beyond your last post.

To measure Engagement Rate you can use marketing tools like Moz, Hubspot, Buzzsumo, etc., and social media reports on engagement and use the data on your total number of followers to calculate the engagement rate.

25. Follower Growth Rate

The KPI of follower growth measures the number of new followers you have gained on a specific social media platform over a given period of time and compares it to a predetermined target.

Social media follower growth varies widely depending on the size of the company, the industry, and the platform.

When tracking a social media metric, it’s best to think in terms of rates and percentages rather than raw numbers because it doesn’t tell you as much about how quickly you’re gaining followers as your growth rate.

The follower growth rate expressed as a percentage growth rate measures how quickly your social media account is gaining or losing followers compared to your previous follower count.

The follower growth rate is calculated as the number of followers you gained divided by the number of followers you started, multiplied by 100%

For example, if your business starts with 1000 followers and gains 100 followers in one month, it has achieved a 10% growth rate.

Continuously monitoring the follower growth rate allows you to better evaluate the performance of your campaigns.

It’s important to not only measure the number of new followers you’re getting but also to compare it to your goals or even your competitors.

This gives an indication of your share of conversation and success on a certain platform.

26. Leads and Conversions from Social Media

Social media can serve as a cost-effective lead generation tool. Measuring lead generation from social media is important because it ensures that you are getting the best return on your social media investment.

It lets you know how many of your fans are actually interested in buying from your company. This is the ultimate measure of your social media marketing success. If you’ve truly found the right people and kept them engaged, they will be interested in purchasing your product or service.

For your Inbound strategy to be complete you need to be able to measure the number of customers acquired. You need to identify which social media channels are producing the highest numbers and which are producing the lowest. This shows you where you need to spend more time and where your best leads are coming from.

Focus on the social media KPIs that are most relevant to the platforms your brand is active on and that best match the buying behavior of your audience.

To measure the number of leads and conversions from social media you can use a CRM tool to track all leads and customers with a social media lead source.

Advertising

Taking into account some of the  KPIs of advertising in your paid ads helps you better evaluate the profitability of their ROI (return on investment).

27. Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

Pay per click (PPC) also called Cost per click (CPC) shows you how much you spend every time someone clicks on one of your ads. You can use this KPI for search engines as well as for social media advertising campaigns.

28. Cost of Customer Acquisition

The cost of customer acquisition is the amount of money you spend to acquire a new customer.

29. Cost per Conversion (CPC)

This marketing KPI shows how much it costs to acquire a new customer. It is calculated by adding up all marketing-related expenses and dividing them by the number of new leads. It is the cost per conversion that reflects the real profitability of paid campaigns.

By comparing the cost per lead to the cost per conversion (CPC), you can assess whether various marketing activities are cost-effective in relation to the effort, time and resources spent to attract new leads.

To measure cost per conversion:

• Calculate the cost of all resources, time, and money spent on paid advertising campaigns. Divide it by the number of leads that converted to paying customers.

To improve cost per conversion:

• Target keywords with little competition (find highly targeted long-tail keywords).
• Improve your landing page experience
• Provide useful sales/customer support materials.

30. Sales Growth

Sales growth is one of the most important KPIs for any business because it is directly linked to revenue and profitability. Without revenue growth, companies risk being outpaced by the competition and stagnating.

Sales growth is a strategic indicator that is used in decision-making by executives and the board of directors and influences the formulation and execution of corporate strategy.

Two key sales performance indicators consist of tracking:

• Current sales revenue: The total dollar value of sales during the current period.
• Revenue from previous period sales: The total dollar value of sales in the previous period.

Sales growth is displayed as a percentage and is calculated using the following formula:

Conclusion

By knowing these marketing KPIs you will be able to decide which KPIs are relevant to your campaigns and goals, and use them to monitor your performance, analyze your results and demonstrate the value of your work.

It is essential to evaluate the performance of your lead generation, social media, advertising, and SEO strategy. And the best way to do this is to track various marketing KPIs.

With an enterprise dashboard and marketing tools, you can monitor marketing KPIs, get an overview of your marketing performance and make informed decisions to improve your results.