12 Key Marketing Metrics You Should Already Be Tracking

Seeing your name in print might be nice, but it’s not a trackable metric. When it comes to real marketing, there are specific numbers you should be following and working to improve.

So what’s your strategy? To find out what others were tracking to qualify success, we asked 12 entrepreneurs from YEC what marketing metrics they really cared about, and why. Here’s what they said.

1) Qualified Leads

Many companies measure a marketing campaign's success off of leads. Our most successful campaigns produce a low number of leads, but a high percentage of qualified leads. We have a team member who goes through leads that comes through our website and determines if it is high quality or not. She then reaches out to those people individually instead of just leaving them on an email drip campaign.

2) Number of Comments

Things like social shares might indicate engagement, but study after study shows that people more often than not share something without even reading it. In my experience, the only reliable indicator of quality engagement is comments. Someone taking the time to comment will likely have read the whole thing and also felt strongly about it. That reaction is exactly what I consider success.

3) Amount of Content Shared

It's been hard for us to truly measure social interaction, but one metric we like seeing is when our content is shared or retweeted to the individual's network. It's creating an organic brand ambassador that trusts your content enough to share it.

4) Customer Acquisition Cost

How much does it cost to acquire a customer? Add up all your marketing expenses -- including salaries and overhead -- and divide by how many new customers were acquired in a given time period. For example, if you spent $10,000 marketing dollars in a month and added 10 customers, then your customer acquisition cost is $1,000. From here, you'll be able to tell how effective your marketing really is.

5) Net Promoter Score

The only marketing metric that matters to us is our Net Promoter Score (NPS). It's a catch-all metric that lets you know if your customers would recommend your brand to their friends and family. If that number is high -- or at least trending upwards -- your brand is improving. NPS is indicative of successful word of mouth and is a multiplier for all of your marketing efforts.

6) Time Spent on Site

In addition to traffic on our website, we like to see that people are spending a lot of time on our site and looking at a variety of pages, reading content, etc. We feel people are seeing value and finding what they're looking for if they spending time reading our content and going to multiple pages.

7) Monthly Recurring Revenue

In our SaaS (software as a service) business, we really care about the Monthly and Annual recurring revenue rate. Being in a recurring model, it's important to continue to grow this metric each and every month as it is foundational to sustaining our entire business.