B2B Marketing KPIs You MUST Track

According to CMO 2020 survey, approximately 11.3% of B2B companies budget is spent on marketing every single year.

As a B2B company investing heavily in marketing, you need to measure whether you are getting positive ROI from your investment. In this article, you will find 10 essential B2B marketing KPIs you need to track in order to understand what your marketing team should focus on next.

Customer Lifetime Value

What Is It?

The customer lifetime value represents the average revenue you can expect from your users. This metric is calculated on the critical factors that will guide your marketing strategy.

It allows you to evaluate how often a user needs to use your product, how long they meet this need from you, and how much money they pay on average for this need.

Why It’s Important?

By evaluating the Customer lifetime value;

1. You can make accurate predictions for your future income. In this way, you can prevent your company from experiencing difficulties by spending more than necessary and not being able to meet this cost. In addition, by estimating your potential income, you can realize your opportunities and invest in the right places at the right time.
2. By segmenting your users, you can offer long-term and repeated services to the user at the right price.
3. By observing the period the average user stays connected to your product via right retention metrics, you can keep your users connected to your product for much longer.

How to Calculate it?

You can calculate this KPI by multiplying your user’s average purchase amount, the frequency of purchases, and the amount of time they’ve been using your product.

MQL

What Is It?

Marketing qualified leads are leads that are closer to being your user than other leads and that have achieved this potential by taking actions in line with the criteria you have determined in line with your marketing strategy.

These criteria can include many actions such as using the demo version of your product, signing up for your e-mail newsletter, spending time actively on your site, and interacting with your products, such as liking and adding products to their cart.

Why It’s Important?

• Analyzing the characteristic of MQLs allows you to develop your product and content to generate potential MQLs. Of course, MQLs are not users who have guaranteed to buy your product, but they are people who have invested a lot of time and effort into your product.

• Considering that you will build your marketing strategy around converting leads to MQL as much as possible, each MQL has a high potential for feedback and user habit analysis.

How to Calculate it?

For some industries and products, an action may be a strong step towards purchasing a product, while for another product or industry, the same action may be considered a minor action.

It would be best to first determine strong criteria according to your product and industry to make this calculation. Leads that meet the proper criteria are classified as MQL and set an example for user acquisition by the marketing and sales department.

Conversion Rate

What Is It?

When creating an advertising campaign in line with your marketing strategy, it is not enough to ensure that as many users visit your product as possible. It would be best to get the right users to take the desired action.

Conversion rate is the rate at which the user, who has encountered your product, acts according to your desired goal.

Your desired destination can be many things depending on your purpose, like subscription, download, purchase, or many other things.

Why It’s Important?

• The user who has come across your product may not take the action you desire for your product for many reasons. Some of these reasons are; the product does not meet the right user; the product is overpriced or does not have features that will push the user to action.
• In addition, the user may not be able to take the desired actions due to technical reasons in the environment where you present your product. These technical Problems can be noticed with he help of this KPI. According to the Ecommerce Shopping Cart Abandonment Statistics report, A better checkout design can result in a 35.26 percent improvement in conversion rate.

Regularly observing the conversion rate makes it possible to spend your money more efficiently and create more accurate campaigns according to the variables you change.

How to Calculate it?

You can calculate the Conversion Rate by dividing the users who perform the actions you want by the total visitors who encounter your product.

ROAS

What Is It?

Return on ad spend is a metric that allows you to understand how efficiently you convert your spending for digital advertising campaigns into revenue.
Regularly observing this metric will help you measure the efficiency of your ad campaigns and make accurate and timely decisions. Especially in the field of B2B marketing, the position of digital campaigns is indisputably critical.

Creating these campaigns in the most efficient way by calculating every penny allows you to use your company’s potential at the maximum level.

Why It’s Important?

• Roas can be used to identify efficient ones among multiple ad campaigns. The budget of advertising campaigns that do not generate returns can be transferred to efficient campaigns. In this way, you will not continue to spend money on campaigns that do not reach the right users or reach very few users.
• It can also allow you to turn your productive campaigns into a sharper weapon.
• Understanding which campaigns are working can also give you a better understanding of trends and industry requirements, allowing you to rethink your entire marketing strategy. In this way, you can gain radical advantages against your competitors.

How to Calculate it?

You can calculate ROAS by dividing your ads’ revenue by your total ad spend.

Organic traffic

What Is It?

Organic traffic is how your users find the solution to their needs in your product organically through search engines, not through an advertising campaign.
Increasing your organic traffic is a cost-efficient, and high-yielding method as your website does not appear in front of people through periodic campaigns, and its content is permanent.
Many companies try to organize their content in line with Search engine optimization trends and monitor the right content marketing metrics in order to increase their organic traffic.

Why It’s Important?

When we compare it with the advertising campaigns in that you try to convince the user that you are the solution to their needs, organic traffic differs in that the users have chosen you in line with their needs.

This means that the user consciously meets you and can show interest in the product you are offering.

Thus, you get a high conversion rate in a cost-efficient way. The user tends to maintain their relationship with the product because they were already looking for a solution to their problem.

How to Calculate it?

When calculating organic traffic, you eliminate the part of users who visit your site from advertisements or references. When you continue the elimination process until only the users who reach through the search engine remain, your organic traffic will come out.

Cost per MQL

What Is It?

Cost per MQL is a metric that allows you to compare the number of leads you earn due to your marketing strategies, meeting the MQL criteria, with your total marketing spend.

Why It’s Important?

MQLs are leads that buy your products and take actions that have the potential to become your user. How much budget you use to fill your MQL pool is a critical issue because it is a direct indicator of the success of your marketing strategy.

If you spend too much on each MQL, this can create sustainability problems in the long run. For this reason, changes you will make with regular monitoring of this metric may result in more efficient use of the budget.

How to Calculate it?

Cost per MQL is easily calculated by dividing your Total marketing spend by the number of new MQLs.

Bounce Rate

What Is It?

Bounce rate is the ratio of users who reached your website through any source, who left your website after viewing only a single page, to your total visitors.
For example, a user reaches your website after your ad campaign reaches him. However, he cannot find what he was promised on the Web site and leaves without switching to another link on your site.
The user mentioned in the example will increase your bounce rate, which is bad news for your marketing strategy.

Why It’s Important?

Bounce rate tracking directly affects the changes you make to your marketing strategy in many ways.

1. A high bounce rate can be due to the fact that the content your users encounter when they reach your website doesn’t match what’s promised in the sources that bring them to you.
2. The technical inadequacies of your website may be making the user difficult to take action or making it impossible to take action.
3. Pop-ups and similar annoying content on your website may have driven the user away.

Bounce rate monitoring allows you to determine whether your actions to solve these problems are rewarded, so you keep the user interacting with your product as much as possible. This will seriously affect your income.

How to Calculate it?

Bounce rate is a metric that can be easily calculated by dividing the number of users who visited a single page on your website and then left without switching to another page by the total number of users who visited.

CTR

What Is It?

Click-Through Rate is an important metric used in a comprehensive perspective for performance measurement in the field of marketing. It is a metric that helps you to observe the click you receive compared to the impressions.

CTR is very important for performance analysis in many subjects, such as the click rate of users encountering an advertising campaign, the click rate of the e-mail you sent in line with your e-mail marketing strategy, the clicks received in organic search results and many similar issues.

CTR has no particular ideal. What your industry is, along with the priorities of your product and company, radically changes the ideal CTR ratio. In some industries, 1% may indicate that you are running a profitable campaign. In some industries, 20% may mean you’re behind your competitors.

In e-mail marketing, this KPI is often compared to CTOR.

Why It’s Important?

CTR helps you measure the performance of your advertising campaigns, Content marketing strategies, or e-mail marketing strategy. Campaigns or content with high or low CTR, especially when compared to other actors in the industry or the industry average, can directly determine your position in the industry.
By observing CTR regularly, you can notice your inefficient campaigns or strategies, adjust your budget, and improve your content. Thus, you get rid of your financial burdens and reach an important user group.

How to Calculate it?

When you determine the number of views and clicks of the content you want to analyze the performance of, you can easily calculate the CTR by dividing the number of clicks by the number of views.

CAC

What Is It?

CAC is a metric that allows you to determine the amount of money you spend on your product in the acquisition process of a user. The calculation of this metric contributes to the planning of long-term investments and making accurate future forecasts.

Why It’s Important?

When this metric is overlooked or ignored, the marketing expenses that we plan to meet with the revenue from user acquisition can easily exceed the revenue generated by the user. This can be defined as the transformation of the marketing strategy from being a tool that grows the company into a monster that consumes it.

Thanks to this metric costs that do not have a radically positive effect on user acquisition, but consume a significant part of our budget, can be identified, and adjustments can be made on these costs.

In this way, much higher income gain can be achieved with much less expense with investments to be made in the right places.

How to Calculate it?

Cac can be easily calculated by dividing Total marketing and selling expenses by the total number of users gained. A low CAC indicates that your marketing department is pursuing successful strategies.

You can see the Complex Calculation formula here.

Revenue by channel

What Is It?

Revenue by channel is a KPI that allows you to compare the channels users can reach you and determine which channel generates more revenue.

In this way, you can distribute the budget to the channels more efficiently and optimize your advertising campaigns for the right channels.

Why It’s Important?

1. The main importance of regularly monitoring the revenue generated by each channel is to spot trends and understand which channel to prioritize. In this way, you can use your budget efficiently by investing in the right channels at the right time and prevent your competitors from taking a more active role in important channels.
2. At the same time, seeing from which channels users are interested in your product allows you to analyze the nature of these channels and organize your product and content according to the users who reach you using these channels.

How to Calculate it?

You can calculate revenue by a channel with SaaS analytics tools that can collect and compare data from various channels. When you determine the channels’ revenues, it will be easy to compare the revenue of a particular channel with your total revenue and with other channels.

Conclusion

The B2B Marketing field is shaped by the significant advantages created by monitoring small details. Knowing which metrics directly reflect the performance of your marketing strategy will prevent you from getting lost in details that are not as important as others.

When targets are met for each KPI with consciously planned strategies, you can reach big goals like growing your company much more quickly.

It isn’t easy to measure the success in these indicators manually, and with the use of the right tools, much more successful measurements can be made, and You can save time and labor.