If you are conducting marketing automation activities, you surely want to ensure this strategy is bearing some good fruit and that there are some tangible results of your activities. And while KPIs and metrics that you should track depend mostly on what marketing automation tools you are using, there are ten KPIs that are rather universal and important in all companies. Let’s have a look at them.
We wanted to come up with a general list that you can just copy-paste and start using in your company even today. Many of those metrics are available directly in your marketing automation platform (e.g., email open rates) and some require you to use some third-party tools. For instance, if you’re running Google Ads to promote your business, you will get CTR directly in this, too.
So, what marketing automation KPIs should you track?
10 important marketing automation KPIs
CONVERSION RATE (CR)
In general, conversions are the desired actions you want your potential clients to take. Booking a call or signing up for a free trial are good examples of such conversions. Every single time you get a new booking, it’s a conversion for your business. The conversion rate (or just CR) is, therefore, the percentage of leads or contacts that take the desired action. Obviously, the higher the conversion rate, the better because this directly says that your marketing efforts are very effective.
CLICK-THROUGH RATE (CTR)
This one is fairly self-explanatory – CTR measures how many people clicked your ad/link compared to how many people saw it (so-called impressions). If you have 100 impressions and 10 clicks, this means that your CTR is at 10%. CTR is a very important metric, especially in Google Ads, because it shows the effectiveness of your ads. If your ads don’t get high CTRs, you’ll struggle with getting good results.
OPEN RATE (OR)
This KPI is used almost exclusively in email marketing. It tells us how many people opened your email (instead of deleting it immediately). The higher OR, the better. This metric works similarly to CTR – if you sent 100 emails and 10 recipients opened them, your OR is 10%.
ENGAGEMENT RATE
This metric is very important but not always easy to understand. In general, engagements in marketing refer to various interactions that users have with your content. Typically, such interactions comprise:
- Clicks
- Likes
- Shares
Engagement can be calculated in various ways depending on the context. For example, when it comes to social media engagement, you add all the clicks, comments, shares, and mentions and divide them by the total number of impressions. The more people are engaged with your content, the better because this means that your posts and articles are interesting to your target audience.
LEAD GENERATION RATE
This metric is hugely important from a business standpoint. It measures how many leads per month are generated via a specific marketing channel. You can calculate the lead generation rate easily by dividing the number of leads generated by the total interactions or impressions and multiplying the result by 100%.
For instance, if you conducted a social media campaign that resulted in 100 new leads and reached 5,000 people:
Lead Generation Rate = (100 / 5000) × 100% = 2%
COST PER ACQUISITION (CPA)
This KPI is also very important because it tells you whether your marketing efforts are profitable. For example, if you make, on average, $100 on each client and your marketing requires you to spend $150 to get each client, you are actually losing money.
Of course, this looks a bit different in sectors where the LTV (lifetime value) of a client is high. Even if you lose money the first month, each client will stay with your company for much longer than a month, so you can easily get your money back and then some.
A high CPA is also acceptable if you’re just starting, and you need to get the first clients to validate your business idea and get some first testimonials. However, in the long run, you should do whatever you can to make CPA as low as possible.
CUSTOMER LIFETIME VALUE (CLV)
This is the total value a customer brings to your business over their entire relationship with your company. CLV is always based on some assumptions and previous results. To calculate it precisely, you should use only customers who have already left your business. Here’s an example: If you run a SaaS company and your users usually stay with you for two years, your lifetime value is the amount of money you make monthly on each user times 24 months.
RETURN ON INVESTMENT (ROI)
This is a general metric that shows you how much revenue you generate compared to the overall cost of your marketing campaign. Generally speaking, every positive ROI is a good result. So, for instance, if you spend $1,000 on your marketing and you make $1,200 as a result, you’re good – you’re making some money on your marketing, so you can continue to do so and perhaps even try to improve your efforts so that ROI can go up.
CHURN RATE
Unfortunately, you must also track all the clients/users who leave your company (who stop using your service or unsubscribe). A high churn rate means that your service is not tailored to the needs of your target audience or that it’s too expensive or of low quality or usefulness. In short, there is something wrong with it. However, every single company in the world has a churn rate, so if it’s within reasonable limits (you can assume less than 20% annually), you’re good.
WEB TRAFFIC
Lastly, you should monitor your web traffic. Here, you can use Google Analytics to get accurate information. Most businesses monitor website visits, page views, time spent on the site, bounce rate, and other relevant metrics because they allow them to assess the effectiveness of their marketing efforts as well as verify the popularity of their website.
Wrapping up
Marketing metrics and KPIs are important because they:
- Give you an accurate view of what’s going on with your marketing
- Help you improve and strive to achieve better results in the future
If you use a marketing automation platform, it surely provides you with many metrics and KPIs that are related to the activities you conduct in your company.
However, if you’re not satisfied with your marketing automation platform, or you’re not getting enough marketing data, you are most welcome to give iPresso a try. We invite you to start with a free 30-day trial.
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