The Only 7 Marketing KPIs Worth Tracking

2. User and customer acquisition

If you have a subscription-based business, this might be your proper KPI. It reflects how effectively your marketing communication attracts users who are likely to buy something from you. The quantity and quality of your leads are a precursor to a growing customer base and sales growth.

How to measure

It’s easy to figure out lead quantity, as that information should be in your CRM. It’s the lead quality tracking that needs more work and planning. This is where we get into lead scoring. Develop an automated system that scores all your leads based on the data they provide.

Here are some data points you should consider evaluating:

• Estimated purchasing power of the company
• User behavior and actions taken in your app or website
• Trial tier and setup
• Anything the user said to your customer or sales team
• Any other data you collect from your user registration process

For this, it’s worth consulting an analytics expert. Some CRM platforms like Hubspot have built-in lead scoring functionality, but it may not be the best solution for your use case.

Customer lifetime value (CLV) is a metric that estimates how much money an individual customer will spend on your products or services. Increasing your average customer’s worth not only improves your financial metrics but also allows you to spend more on acquiring new customers.

How to measure

This is the most basic formula to calculate CLV:

Avg. Order Value x Avg. Annual Purchase Frequency x Avg. Customer Lifespan

If your AOV is $100, customers buy the product four times a year and stay loyal to your company for three years on average, the CLV would be 100*4*3 = $1,200.

Naturally, you need at least a few years of sales history to get the metrics for CLV calculations. But if you already have this, you can also estimate which of those three metrics needs improving the most. If you increase any of them, overall CLV goes up.

Share of Voice (SOV) is traditionally a measure of your advertising share compared to competitors. However, with most brands now fighting for visibility on organic channels like social and search, we can broaden that definition to how visible your brand is in the market.

This is an excellent marketing KPI because there’s a strong relationship between SOV and market share. Once your SOV exceeds your market share, you create excess SOV (eSOV). Your market share should follow in the same direction in the long run.

Of course, getting one comprehensive SOV number encompassing all of your marketing channels is undeniably tricky. The solution? Pick a metric for each channel that reflects the principle of SOV.

How to measure

Here are a few marketing channels and their respective metrics that can represent SOV:

Organic search: visibility in SERPs
Paid search: Impression Share
Organic social media: brand mentions relative to your competitors
TV ads: Gross Rating Points (GRP)

So, for example, with organic search, the simplest method is to track your main keywords in a Rank Tracker, add your competitors’ domains, and check the visibility metric in the Competitors Overview tab.

The visibility metric shows the percentage of all clicks from tracked keywords on your and your competitors’ websites.

Brand awareness represents your brand’s level of familiarity with your target audience. For example, the brand that first comes to mind when considering electric cars is probably Tesla, not Rivian. That’s because Tesla enjoys a higher level of brand awareness among consumers.

Here are two things you can measure regarding your brand awareness.

• Saliency. Does your brand come to people’s minds in your industry? In other words, what percentage of your market knows about you?
• Positioning. Do people resonate with your positioning? Is your marketing communication creating the right associations around your brand?

How to measure

Measuring brand awareness requires market research resources because you need answers from a representative sample from your market. Market research agencies specialize in this and are your only option to get comprehensive data.

Net Promoter Score (NPS) represents customer satisfaction and loyalty based on how likely they are to recommend your product or service to others.

You’ve likely seen one of these:

The score the user selects dictates whether they’re a detractor, passive, or promoter.

The NPS score is then calculated by subtracting the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters. It can range between -100 and 100, and anything above zero means that you have more promoters than detractors.

Generally speaking, scores above 70 are considered exceptional, but the threshold can be lower depending on the industry you’re in. Just think about telecommunication companies that we all need but also dislike. They’d be happy to see scores above zero, as you can see from these industry benchmarks.

Overall, NPS is an easy-to-measure metric that reflects your customer loyalty, satisfaction, and brand strength.

How to measure

There are many NPS survey distribution channels—physical, online, email, or just a popup window in the browser.

The calculation is easy, and some pieces of software already do it for you. But keep in mind that it’s still just one number without any context. If you decide to measure NPS, you should also look into the motivation behind users’ score decisions. You can ask follow-up questions as a part of the survey to get this qualitative data.

Final thoughts

You might wonder why I left out metrics like Return on Investment (ROI) and Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC). The short answer is that although they’re good metrics to track, you must be careful with them. They lock you in for short-term decision-making.

Use these metrics as KPIs for channels where they make sense, like PPC ads. But it doesn’t make sense to look at ROI or CAC if we shift to display advertising—something that also tends to be covered by PPC specialists.

The long-term effect of getting your brand in front of people with display ads can be bigger than people clicking through. And it makes even less sense to use these metrics to evaluate purely brand-related channels like TV or billboards.

But most importantly, don’t measure any metric just for the sake of it. Make sure to set strategic marketing objectives that use these KPIs.