The success of any business or marketing strategy lies in a lot of factors. But one of the most significant ones is selecting and tracking relevant and smart marketing metrics. You’d think that with the availability of numerous digital tools, things have become easier for marketers. Ideally, yes.
However, it’s a marathon, not a sprint. First, you have to choose and use the right marketing metrics that will guide and help you understand your progress (or lapses) toward your marketing goals. After all, Google found that 89% of leading marketers use strategic metrics to measure campaign effectiveness.

What’s the difference between marketing goals and objectives?

Before anything else, let’s define common marketing strategy terms.
In general, goals and objectives are often used interchangeably but there are subtle differences between the two. A marketing goal is more comprehensive and long-term compared with an objective. Both have desired results. But an objective includes specific actions you and your team should do to achieve the broader, marketing goal.
For example, your marketing goal is to boost website traffic. Your objective can, then, be to increase your organic traffic by 20% in three months.

What’s the difference between marketing metrics and KPIs?

Marketing metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) are quantifiable measurements of an activity such as your advertising, social media, and sales campaigns. The main difference is the purpose.
Metrics allow you to track performance and identify results. They are quantifiable and indicative of the success or failure of any marketing activity. On the other hand, KPIs are much more specific. They include a set of measurable values and milestones relative to a goal or objective.
Simply put, metrics are data points that support KPIs. KPIs are tied to and support an overall marketing or business outcome. For instance, a metric can be the number of MQLs that converted to SQLs. Meanwhile, a KPI might be the targeted percentage increase in newsletter signups per quarter.

What metrics to monitor and evaluate for marketing goals?

Definitions are now set and clear. It’s time to know which metrics to look at for gauging the effectiveness of your campaigns. By carefully choosing the right metrics, you’re increasing the chance of achieving any of the following most common marketing goals.

Marketing Goal 1: Generate more leads

• Number of leads – Number of new leads
• Leads generated by channel – Number of new leads generated per channel source including website, LinkedIn, third-party partners, events, and more
• Landing page conversion rate – Percentage of leads who completed the landing page call to action out of all page visitors
• Cost per lead – Amount of money you spent per new lead gained
• Time to conversion – Time it takes from the first contact to lead conversion
• Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL) – Number of leads that marketing deems qualified
• Sales Qualified Leads (SQL) – Number of leads that sales deems qualified
• MQL to SQL conversion rate – Percentage of MQL that converted to SQL

Marketing Goal 2: Grow brand awareness on social media

• Comments – Number of comments left on posts, stories, and other updates
• Shares – Number of times your audience shared your content
• @mentions – Number of times your brand was mentioned
• Impressions – Number of times people have seen your content even if there’s no engagement
• Link clicks – Number of people who followed a link within your content
• Audience growth rate – Percentage of new followers acquired over a given period
• Website traffic from social media – Percentage of your website traffic that came from social channels

Marketing Goal 3: Increase blog traffic and performance

• Clickthrough rate (CTR) – Percentage of people who clicked a result from search engine queries to your site
• Traffic sources – Channels that referred traffic to your blog
• Sessions – Number of visits to your blog
• Returning visits – All hits from people who have been to your blog before
• Sessions by device – Total number of visits per type of device used
• Top pages – Your best-performing pages
• Pageviews per visit – Average number of pages one visitor viewed on your blog
• Time on page – Average time spent on a blog post or page before leaving
• Bounce rate – Percentage of visitors who only viewed one page on your blog before leaving
• Downloads – Number of downloaded blog assets

Marketing Goal 4: Improve email marketing conversions

• Subscribes vs unsubscribes rates – Number of people who signed up to or opted out of emails
• Spam percentage – Percentage showing how likely your email will go to spam
• Open rate – Number of times your emails have been opened
• Action rate over time – Number of emails opened at a given time
• Warm reply rate – Percentage of people who replied positively versus the total number of emails sent
• Link clicks – Number of times email recipients clicked on a link within your email
• Conversion rate – Percentage of people who clicked a link in an email and completed a desired action
• Bounce rate – Percentage of total emails that couldn’t be delivered

How to track marketing goals, metrics and overall progress (or failures)?

In the grand scheme of things, it’s important to note that this is not a definitive list and that succeeding depends on more than just choosing metrics. What also impacts the effectiveness of your marketing strategy is having a general understanding and collaboration between you and other concerned teams in the organization.
Sharing defined goals, objectives, metrics, and KPIs can help not only marketers but also sales and customer success to deliver the ultimate goal for businesses today. That is, personalized customer journeys that attract, engage, convert, and retain customers.
With these many quantifiable measurements, you’d wonder if there is any way to simplify things? Well, of course. You can track all of your marketing metrics in one place with Dealtale.
Dealtale is the single platform for analyzing, optimizing, and monitoring all customer touchpoints (across marketing, sales, and customer success. It turns data into insights so you can remove frictions from customer journeys, build meaningful customer relationships, and deliver seamless customer experiences.
With all your data points in one place, you can immediately see what’s working and what’s not. You’ll be able to manage performance across your funnel to address issues quickly and measure how your efforts impact and influence the bottom line.
Try it today! Dealtale takes only 10 minutes to set up. We invite you to activate our ‘Free Forever’ plan through Dealtale’s Sign Up Page.