What Are KPIs in Marketing?

If you’ve spent any time in business environments, you’ve likely heard the term KPI, but you might not be aware of just how important KPIs can be to a marketing department. KPI stands for key performance indicator, and it’s the critical element you need to track in order to measure progress achieved toward a goal or objective.

Marketing KPIs are the metrics and results that determine your progress toward a marketing campaign objective. There are hundreds of possible marketing KPIs, and each marketing department will probably track a different selection depending on their specific needs. However, several KPIs are particularly important, no matter the size of the marketing department.

These marketing KPI examples should shed light on the most important and common marketing KPIs your marketing department should be tracking.

Sales growth: Sales growth gives marketing departments a basic understanding of whether their efforts across channels and activities are paying off collectively.
Marketing ROI: Marketing attributed ROI involves measuring the amount of profit each marketing activity generates and is a KPI every marketing department will need to track consistently.
Email marketing performance: Marketing departments should be closely tracking email marketing KPIs, including open rates and unsubscribes, as well as click-through and conversion rates.
Landing page conversion rates: Landing page conversion rates give marketers an understanding of how effective their messaging is at converting site visitors to sales.
Organic web traffic: Measuring organic web traffic can help marketers reach SEO objectives and determine which keywords should be optimized to reach those goals.
Social media: While social media KPIs are often viewed as vanity statistics, they can indicate the health of the brand when they include likes, shares, followers, click-throughs, and conversions.
Leads: Each element of the marketing funnel should be tracked as KPIs, giving marketing departments information about how well they are meeting their lead objectives.
Customer lifetime value: When marketers can track customer lifetime value over time, they can get a sense of whether this important segment of the customer base is increasing at the desired rate.

Choosing the right marketing KPIs

Choosing the right marketing KPIs for your team is absolutely critical to being able to make progress toward your goals and objectives. First, you’ll need to carefully consider your core objectives based on your marketing strategy and marketing plan. For example, a marketing department could have an objective of increasing leads generated by marketing activities by 30% over the next year. The marketing KPI for this objective would be measuring the marketing attributed lead generation growth month on month to ensure that 30% increase will be met by the deadline.

You’ll also need to determine the marketing software and tools you’ll require in order to measure these KPIs so that you can track them properly from the outset. The right marketing dashboard can help a marketing department drill down into the granular details that can show them what’s working, what’s not, and how they can adjust course to not only meet KPIs but crush them.