How to choose the right marketing KPIs

Editor’s note: This is an excerpt from a guide available on our website here: https://www.koroberi.com/resources/b2b-marketing-benchmarks/. Click the link for more benchmarking tips and for a downloadable guide to B2B-specific benchmarks for your marketing channels.?

As marketers, we spend a lot of time tracking and analyzing mountains of data to measure the effectiveness of our activities. We compare metrics against benchmarks to justify resources, identify areas for improvement, adjust creative and evaluate our position in a competitive marketplace.

But as many of you know, it can be difficult to hunt down relevant B2B benchmarks to help answer the question, “Are these results good?” We at Koroberi can help answer that question and offer a framework to turn raw, unfiltered data into insights that guide action.

Metrics to track

The first step in evaluating marketing performance is to identify what success looks like and how it is measured. It’s important to be intentional when determining what specific metrics are both relevant and measurable during campaign planning, because it’s not one-size-fits-all.

Take impressions for example. Whether measuring on social media, advertising or website, impressions are the total number of times content could have been seen – a useful measurement when the campaign objective is brand awareness. But what if the objective of a campaign is lead generation? In that case, impressions are not nearly as important as, say, engagement rates.

And beware of vanity metrics. These are reporting measurements that don’t add any depth to your understanding – they do little to prove ROI or measure company growth or positioning. Instead, they’re just those “nice-to-know” stats that might help you fill up a PowerPoint slide.

The rule of thumb is any reporting metric that does not support business objectives should be considered meaningless.

See below for a list of common business objectives, and a sampling of best-fit metrics to measure success.

Increase brand awareness

·?????? Impressions or reach

·?????? Pageviews

·?????? Unique opens and/or open rate

·?????? Number of new followers or subscribers

·?????? Share of voice

·?????? Cost per impression

Drive engagement

·?????? Interactions (mentions, shares, comments, likes, etc.)

·?????? Unique clicks and/or click rate

·?????? Engagement rate

·?????? Average session duration

·?????? Pages per session

·?????? Cost per click

Increase conversions

·?????? Conversion rate

·?????? Click rate

·?????? Number of leads

·?????? Cost per lead

If you’re interested in a list of current, B2B-specific marketing benchmarks, check out the full guide on our website at https://www.koroberi.com/resources/b2b-marketing-benchmarks/.