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Marketing Metrics: What to Measure in Marketing - Part I

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This article is the first in a series called Marketing Metrics: What to Measure in Marketing. Use this link to read What to Measure in Marketing Part II: Website Metrics.

Part I: The High Level Executive Metrics

As more and more companies move from "old marketing" or "outbound marketing" (tradeshows, print advertising, direct mail, telemarketing) and embrace "modern marketing" or "inbound marketing" (using the Internet to make it easier for customers to find you using your website, SEO, PPC, Blogs, etc.) a lot of people wonder what metrics they should track to measure their success and progress.  Based on speaking with a number of our customers, my experience in Internet marketing for the past decade, and talking with the Internet marketing gurus at HubSpot, here are some ideas for the 5 metrics you should track at an executive level.

1) Website Grade - The great thing about this score is that is it very easy to understand (who doesn't comprehend a 1 to 100 score?), and it compares you against your peers (currently over 70,000 other websites), and it is based on a number of different metrics so it summarizes data to save time.  This metric is available for free from the Website Grader SEO Tool.

2) Website Traffic - This is the total number of unique visitors to your website over a time period, usually a month.  At a high level, this gives you a sense of the overall interest in your business, and if the marketing programs you are doing are working or not.

3) Leads - This is the next step in the sales funnel, and is the most important metric for measuring your marketing efforts.

4) New Customers - "How many sales did you close this month?" is probably the most important question you should answer for your business.

5) Customer Acquisition Cost - Many businesses don't compute this on an ongoing basis, but knowing the total sales and marketing cost for each new customer (on average each month) is important.  It gives you a good sense of how your business is going, and if it is getting easier or harder to grow.

Of course there are many more things you could track, but the goal of this list is to have 5 things that you should measure on a monthly basis to see a high level or executive view of your business.  In the other articles in the series, I will discuss more detailed metrics for measuring marketing in more detail.  One final note, make sure to measure these metrics as a trend, keeping track of how they change over time.  The real value is not just in knowing where you stand, but also knowing if you are moving forward or backward.

What do you measure for your business?  Are there any particular detailed metrics you would like to see discussed in future articles?  Leave a comment below and let me know. 

Posted by Mike Volpe on Thu, Aug 30, 2007 @ 11:11 AM