The Complete List of Marketing KPIs

Effective marketing is vital to scale your business and overall strategy. A good Marketing KPI Dashboard will set you up for success by giving you the data you need to make decisions and help you stay on track of your Marketing Strategy.

So which Marketing KPIs should feature in your own marketing strategy and dashboard? Let’s take a look at some of the most common ones.

Example Generic Marketing KPIs

We’ll start with a collection of generic marketing KPIs that are used across multiple companies. These are ones that fit most businesses and you’ll commonly find them on the main KPI dashboard.

Revenue
Type: Currency

Revenue is a KPI that features in every situation. You may be a company looking to increase revenue to grow or a non-profit looking to increase income for charitable projects. Revenue is the metric that provides one of the clearest indications as to if the company is being successful in the strategic approach and is often the end goal of marketing.

Number of Leads
Type: Number

One of the most common KPIs for any marketing department is the basic but key metric of Number of Leads. It’s ultimately why a lot of marketing exists, so would be a key aspect for any dashboard. Taken further, this KPI is often broken down by the individual marketing channels in order to establish what works effectively for the business.

Cost Per Lead
Type: Currency

The Cost Per Lead is an important measurement when you’re running any marketing function. It’s calculated by your total marketing spend on a particular activity divided by the number of leads. For example, if you spend £100 on Google and get 10 leads, your CPL is £10. When used in conjunction with the KPIs below around customer value, this becomes a useful metric to optimise your margins.

Customer Acquisition Cost
Type: Currency

Your Customer Acquisition Cost is a really important KPI that looks at how much it costs to gain each customer. This is often used in conjunction with Customer Lifetime Value (see below) to establish how much gain (or loss!) each added customer is contributing to the business.

Customer Lifetime Value
Type: Currency

This KPI is the total amount of revenue the business expects to get from one customer on average. It might be you have reoccurring revenue through many years, or maybe a series of one-off amounts, or it may just be a single payment. When combined with KPIs such as Customer Acquisition Cost or Cost Per Lead you can start to get valuable insight into how you’re performing.

Sales Growth
Type: Percentage or Currency

Sales Growth can be measured as either a % of year-on-year change or as a currency number. It’s often the case that companies will have some sort of growth target and sometimes that can be directly assigned to marketing. Sales Growth is a good KPI for companies in a growth mindset and can provide a sense of achievement if going well, or a suggestion of the need for change if not performing.

Sale Cycle Length
Type: Duration

This KPI is often used in enterprise selling and refers to the time it takes for a sale to complete from initial engagement through to contract signature. The shorter the better!

Lead to Customer Ratio
Type: Number or Percentage

Knowing your Lead to Customer Ratio will inform how many leads you need in order to hit your customer numbers and ultimately revenue target. It’s a great KPI used in planning and often broken down per marketing channel.

Lead Response Times
Type: Duration

Getting an inbound lead usually requires some outbound response, and whilst a lot is automated in this space, you’ll often find a human sales team working behind the scenes. This KPI measures how quickly the team respond and is a good way to judge if you’re starting that relationship with prospective customers on the right foot.

Marketing Qualified Leads
Type: Number

Often shortened to MQL, these are leads that are likely to be qualified and potential customers based on comparing them to other historic lead data and traits. Recording the number of MQLs is important as it helps understand the quality of your total leads.

Sales Qualified Leads
Type: Number

Shortened to SQL, these are leads that have been qualified by the sales team. This is often the next step on from MQL and is an important metric to establish how well the MQL level is performing, as well as the overall marketing.

Lead to MQL
Type: Percentage

This KPI measures the percentage of leads that become MQLs, and is a guide to the quality of the lead traffic that is being produced.

MQL to SQL
Type: Percentage

This KPI measures the percentage of MQLs that convert to SQLs and is used as a general guide to how effective the MQL process is being in identifying potential prospects.

SQL to Quote
Type: Percentage

Another percentage KPI, this one rating the percentage of SQLs that become actual sales quotes. It is used to measure the effectiveness of the sales process.

Example Digital Marketing KPIs

Digital Marketing KPIs are metrics that are specific to your online activity. Businesses that are solely online will traditionally be focused on this set, but even offline companies should be considering the importance of these values in relation to their business.

Organic Traffic
Type: Number

Any web focused marketer should be looking at organic traffic at regular intervals, either daily, weekly or monthly. This is any traffic coming naturally from search engines as a result of your SEO or content. It’s a key KPI that gives you an indication of brand awareness and the success of your content strategy.

Bounce Rate
Type: Percentage

Another metric that is commonly used as a KPI is bounce rate. This is the percentage of users who come to your site and then leave without looking at any other pages. A business would want to reduce the bounce rate to ensure you build a relationship with your audience and ensure they begin to engage with your brand. Content pages tend to have higher bounce rates, due to users specifically coming to the site for the content rather than the product or service. So, if you’re reading this guide, take a look round our side to help our bounce rate!

Backlinks
Type: Number

A backlink is when a site links through to your site. It might be a bit of content you’ve produced or a page around your product/service. Backlinks impact your SEO performance, with high quality and quantity backlinks contributing to higher rankings. For this reason the number of backlinks is a marketing KPI often featured in web marketing dashboards.

Conversion Rate
Type: Percentage

Chances are you’ve got a website where you want your users to perform some sort of action. It might be requesting a demo, signing up for a newsletter, starting a free trial, making a donation, attending an event, or some other event that involves the user providing their data. The conversion rate is the percentage of traffic that visits your site and performs your key action. You may have a number of conversion rates on your site depending on the actions and channels of traffic you use. It’s one of the most important metrics used in marketing KPI dashboards, allowing the marketer to optimise their site.

Average Duration
Type: Time

The amount of time a user spends on your site is one metric that helps you understand their engagement. When combined with the Number of Pages (see below) you can begin to piece together an understanding of how engaged your audience is with your content or brand.

Average Number of Pages
Type: Number

How many pages do your users visit on your site per session? If it’s just one then you’ve traffic that isn’t that engaged with what you do, they’ve visited just for content or a particular bit of information.

Traffic to Lead
Type: Percentage

This KPI looks at how many leads you produce vs your traffic. It can help you determine if you’re attracting the right type of traffic to your site. As with many lead based KPIs, this is often split by channel.

Organic Ranking
Type: Number

Your organic ranking is where you come up in organic search for your key phrases across the search engines. Your goal is get as high as possible for the key phrases you wish to rank in and produce traffic for from search.

Unique Users
Type: Number

Often tracked monthly, this KPI is the number of unique visitors coming to your site. It’s important to measure this to get a full understanding of your audience. For example, if you have 1,000 users a month, you want to be confident you’re reaching 1,000 people, rather than one superfan who visits 1,000 times.

New Visitors
Type: Number

This metric represents the number of brand-new visitors coming to your site. Like other web KPIs, it is often tracked on a weekly or monthly basis, and is key to understanding your brand reach and how your site is propagating out in the public domain.

Sessions
Type: Number

Similar to unique users, this analytics metric is often tracked monthly and is the number of times any user has visited your site.

Example Paid for Traffic KPIs

An important part of many marketing approaches is paid for traffic, where you pay to get your message in front of users on systems such as Google, Facebook or LinkedIn. There are a set of KPIs that are commonly used in this area.

Cost Per Click
Type: Currency

The cost per click is important to track when running any paid for traffic campaign. How much are you paying for every visit to the site, and how does that compare to your Customer Lifetime Value and Conversion Rates?

Cost Per Conversion
Type: Currency

Similar to the above, this KPI measures the cost for each conversion. Depdning on what your aim is, this might be cost for a newsletter sign up, a free trial, or a purchase.

Quality Score
Type: Number

The Quality Score in Google is an estimate of the quality of your advertisements and site. It directly impacts the ranking of your advertisements and so is important to review as part of your Paid For campaigns.

E-commerce Marketing KPIs

Thousands of businesses offer e-commerce online, allowing customers to buy products and services via the web site. In these businesses there are a set of KPIs that are useful to monitor and grow your activity.

Cart Conversion Rate
Type: Percentage

The Cart Conversion Rate is the number of carts that have started and completed through to sale. It’s calculated by the number of successful cart transactions divided by the total number of carts.

Cart Abandonment Rate
Type: Percentage

The Cart Abandonment Rate is the number of carts a user has filled but not completed the checkout process divided by the number of carts in total. It’s a KPI used to understand how effective your e-commerce flow is and is improved via automation of offers, discounts and prompts.

Repeat Purchase Rate
Type: Percentage

This KPI is used to track loyalty and effectiveness of marketing. It measures the number of customers who go on to make multiple purchases.

Average Number of Purchases
Type: Number

For certain e-commerce businesses it’s common to track the average number of purchases per customer. It’s a KPI used to understand loyalty and satisfaction.

Time Between Purchases
Type: Time

This KPI is used to understand the average frequency a customer will make purchases on the site and is used to predict behaviour.

Average Order Value
Type: Currency

The AOV is the average revenue per transaction or order. You’ll have no doubt seen suggestions of items to add to your basket before you checkout, this is to boost the AOV KPI value!

Email Marketing KPIs

E-mail marketing is a continued important channel for many businesses. It comes with it’s own set of unique KPIs, so let’s take a look at some of the measurements you should be using if you are building an Email Marketing KPI Dashboard.

Deliverability
Type: Percentage

Deliverability measures the ability for your emails to successfully be delivered to the inboxes. It’s a really key metric when it comes to effectiveness of your e-mail campaigns, as clearly without good deliverability your messages won’t make it through.

Read Rates
Type: Percentage

Any email-based marketing should measure how many of your recipients actually read your messaging. Read Rate is the percentage of your emails that were read and is commonly impacted by areas such as Subject and From fields.

Response Rates
Type: Percentage

Your email campaigns will either have the objective of a user clicking a link or actually replying. In the latter, the KPI of Response Rate is used. This is the percentage of emails that got a reply from a user. It doesn’t usually count OOO but would count negative responses.

Click Through
Type: Percentage

If your email campaigns have links then tracking your Click Through rates can help understand effectiveness, especially as many people will click on a link rather than reply. This KPI tends to be a percentage of all the emails sent that have had links clicked.

Email Conversion
Type: Percentage

The obvious one – ultimately how many of your receipts become customers. This KPI is the percentage of emails sent that become buyers of your product or service.

Unsubscribe Rate
Type: Number of Percentage

The nightmare of any email marketer! Every email campaign will likely result in some users unsubscribing, so recording this KPI is useful.
 

Example Social Media KPIs

Social is a great way to build up an engaged audience and sits alongside other mature marketing channels. Each social platform has it’s own set of KPIs, but here are some that are across all systems that will be useful.

Social Media Traffic
Type: Number

We’ll start with an obvious KPI! Measuring the amount of traffic you’re generating to your site from your social media is a key parameter. Usually this is done on a weekly or monthly basis and would naturally move on to measuring Leads broken down by type of social network.

Followers
Type: Number

The metric most commonly associated with social media success is the number of followers you have, but whilst this may be a good indication of your reach, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve an engaged audience. This KPI should always be used in conjunction with some of the others in this guide.

Page Likes
Type: Number

Certain networks operate pages and a Like model, working very similarly to Followers. Whilst Likes can give some insight into sentiment, it’s again a metric to be used but not solely judged on for performance.

Engagements
Type: Number

An engagement is when one of your audience has liked or commented on a particular post you’ve made. It might be a piece of content or perhaps a social post, but whatever you’ve done has got a response. Engagements is a good metric to use in conjunction with Followers as it begins to give a picture of how much your audience listen to your output.

Mentions
Type: Number

With social media your company may be mentioned by others posting. This is a good indication of brand awareness… it doesn’t mean it’s positive, but it does mean you’re known!

Shares
Type: Number

A share happens every time someone outside your company shares your posts or content. Shares are a great way to get your content and brand out to more than your core audience, and the number of shares is a way to measure how valuable your audience is finding your content.

Sentiment
Type: Number

If you’re really measuring your social performance and you have a lot of mentions and engagements, then the sentiment of those engagements is really key. After all, a lot of rants about you is a very different measurement to a bunch of praise. Using certain tools, you can establish the sentiment and measure it, much like NPS, to decide if it’s positive or negative.

Growth Rate
Type: Percentage or Number

This is the measurement of growth for your social media, in either followers or traffic. It’s often shown as a month on month growth percentage or actual number.

Example Content Marketing KPIs

Content marketing has become an established way to generate traffic, interest and customers online. It involves the production of content that is published regularly to attract readership. There are a number of specific KPIs that relate to this area.

Content Frequency
Type: Number

A simple measurement for your content marketing is your outbound production. How often do you produce content for your site? Fresh content is key to your site being noticed and your audience remaining engaged. This KPI would be measured usually on a monthly basis.

Average Content Length
Type: Number

Content can be long or short form, keeping an eye on the average length of content produced can help you evaluate if you’re outputting the right level of quality for your industry.

Average Number of Downloads
Type: Number

In content marketing you’ll often have barriers with downloads where users need to provide their email in order to get a download. A measurement of the number of downloads or average number of downloads per content can give valuable insight into if you are getting a return on your content production.

Average Number of Comments
Type: Number

If you enable comments on your blogs, videos or posts then you can use the resulting number as a measurement of engagement with your audience. As with many of these KPIs, they don’t always mean a positive result, so keep in mind why you are tracking the ones you select.

Number of Shares
Type: Number

As with social media, tracking the number of shares per piece of content goes some way to showing the success of your content strategy. The more shares, the more your brand awareness increases and, hopefully, the more data you capture.

Number of Backlinks
Type: Number

Similar to in the Web Marketing KPIs, the number of backlinks is key to success of content and your overall SEO. Measuring the number of backlinks per content is one approach to evaluating the success of the content propagating.

Newsletter Sign Up Conversion
Type: Number of Percentage

It can be sometimes easier to get users to sign up to content or newsletters than your product, so measuring your success via conversion rates for these softer commitment relationships can often feature in marketing dashboards.