Top 7 KPIs for Marketing Leaders

As businesses continue to focus on profitability, margin management, and growth, there’s been increasing pressure for marketers to produce quantifiable results, justify marketing spend, and meet top and bottom line sales targets. That’s why it’s important to track the right KPIs and tie them back to business outcomes, such as ROI, conversions, and engagement. By identifying, measuring, and understanding the right KPIs with real time data, marketers can optimize their campaigns, marketing mix, and media spend in flight. Campaign performance can then be shared with key stakeholders throughout the organization to enhance collaboration, transparency, and communication. Whether you’re a CMO, digital marketer, or advertising agency, the following are seven KPIs marketers can measure to optimize campaigns and deliver on total business objectives.

1. Media Spend
This tracks the budget spent on marketing activities such as paid search, paid social media, programmatic, and other paid advertising. There are a growing number of channels for media spend, so understanding which channels most effectively resonate with your consumer and optimizing spend allocation based on performance is key to efficient use of marketing dollars.
2. Sales
Sales or purchases are a clear indication of performance. Marketers know campaigns are performing well when they can clearly tie campaign execution to a lift in sales. Today, sales can come from ecommerce and point of sale systems from the brand itself and through partners, retailers, and distributors. Marketing intelligence platforms can align all of these checkouts in one view.
3. ROI
While sales are extremely important to any business, so is return on investment. This is calculated by campaign revenue – campaign cost/ campaign cost. Measuring ROI can quickly identify the cost/benefit to a campaign and helps marketers create more efficient use of current and future spend. Marketers today are looking to maximize ROI at granular levels such as creatives, offers, and audience segments.
4. Impressions
Impressions indicate the number of times content is displayed. This is content that was viewed by consumers through social feeds or web pages. This is a great metric for measuring awareness. An increase in impressions often leads to an increase in engagement.
5. Engagement
Engagement is focused on creating value to your consumer and crafting an optimal customer experience. This can be measured in the form of views, likes, shares, comments, or downloads. High engagement typically suggests meritable content or a compelling audience and offer fit.
6. Web Traffic
Web traffic is measured by the number of visits or sessions to a website. This metric is commonly used to measure a business’s effectiveness at attracting an audience. Web traffic can serve as a good digital proxy for consumer consideration when viewed in the context campaigns or demand when viewed in line with organic search.

7. Site Conversions
This is a key indication of your online campaign performance. It tracks the rate at which consumers complete a campaign’s call to action – this could be in the form of making a purchase, downloading an article, or subscribing to your email list.

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