What Business Analytics Should You Use For Your Marketing Metrics

As marketers, we have a lot of resources available to us for accessing data and measuring success.

With the abundance of information at our fingertips (often in real-time) courtesy of great tools like Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, Twitter Analytics, or platforms like HubSpot & HootSuite, we have an excellent idea of what is working and how we can continue to improve on the success of our programs.

Depending on the audience you’re trying to reach, the strategies and channels you are using to reach them and the overall objective, each campaign may call for different metrics to assess effectiveness. There are a variety of marketing agency metrics you or your team may use to help improve your marketing and day-to-day performance. Those metrics may include but are not limited to:

• Social media engagement
• Time on website
• Email response rate
• Web traffic sources
• Facebook ads performance
• Click through rate
• Top viewed posts
• Number of new followers
• Keyword rankings

And that is just a sampling of the bounty that is marketing metrics today. We love all our metrics – all of them! They tell us so much and we use them to make decisions every day.

As much as we adore our many metrics, that’s a lot of noise to present to executive level decision makers. Attempting to dazzle the CEO or CFO with a tidal wave of data is not the right strategy. Though they help us improve our work and do our jobs better, it’s important that we as marketers understand that the soft metrics (like those listed above) are not what is driving the business. The bosses do not always care about how we optimized content or improved time on page. They want to know the big picture KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). They want to know what’s moving the needle. 

Which Business Analytics Help Drive Top-Level Decision Making?

When presenting results to the boss or other decision makers how do we hone in on the business analytics that will help guide organizational decision making? Marketing KPIs that speak to leadership generally demonstrate just how much marketing is contributing to company growth and the bottom line. Critical KPIs will vary based on the industry, what stage your business is in and the strategic objectives, but here are six that we believe resonate with decision makers. 

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

Customer Acquisition Cost is the metric used to determine the total average cost your company spends to acquire a new customer.

CAC is calculated by taking the total Sales + Marketing Costs and divide by the number of New Customers in that time period.

Sales & Marketing Costs = program and advertising spend + salaries + commissions and bonuses + overhead in a month, quarter or year.

New Customers = number of new customers in a month, quarter or year.

Let’s look at an example: 

What CAC Means and Why It Matters: CAC illustrates how much your company is spending per new customer acquired. You want a low average CAC. An increase in CAC means that you are spending comparatively more for each new customer, which can imply there’s a problem with your sales or marketing efficiency.

Marketing % of Customer Acquisition Cost

The Marketing % of Customer Acquisition Cost is the marketing portion of your total CAC, calculated as a percentage of the overall CAC.

Ratio of Customer Lifetime Value to CAC (LTV:CAC)

The Ratio of Customer Lifetime Value to CAC is a way for companies to estimate the total value that your company derives from each customer compared with what you spend to acquire that new customer.

Time to Payback CAC

The Time to Payback CAC shows you the number of months it takes for your company to earn back the CAC it spent acquiring new customers.

Marketing Originated Customer %

The Marketing Originated Customer % is a ratio that shows what new business is driven by marketing, by determining which portion of your total customer acquisitions directly originated from marketing efforts.

Marketing Influenced Customer %

The Marketing Influenced Customer % takes into account all of the new customers that marketing interacted with while they were leads, anytime during the sales process.

For more details about these metrics, how to calculate them and why they matter, download The 6 Marketing Metrics Your Boss Actually Cares About below

Once you’ve determined which KPIs are right for your business and matter most to your leadership, make sure that the rest of the team and their day-to-day activities are in alignment, develop reports that track your progress toward those KPIs and use the information to its full potential.