Why Are Marketing Metrics Important? Understanding Key Performance Indicators for Data-Driven Marketers

Marketing metrics are essential to understanding the "why" behind every campaign performance. Marketing metrics are necessary to gain deeper insights into the effectiveness and areas that need adjustment to get the best results. However, not all metrics are relevant for tracking, and including them in your marketing analytics might distract you from the fundamental information about your campaign. Additionally, tracking the right metrics without using tools like Kyligence Zen creates the daunting task of manually cleaning, organization, analyzing, and interpreting your marketing data across channels. Kyligence Zen offers a central point to analyze all data, set goals, and foster stakeholder collaboration. In this article, you will learn:

• Why 89% of leading marketers rely on key strategic metrics.
• Metrics Vs. KPIs, types of metrics in marketing. 
• Best practices for getting outstanding results.
• Simplifying marketing analytics with Kyligence.

Importance of Marketing Metrics for Business Success

At its core, tracking key metrics will help you identify areas in marketing campaigns you should optimize to improve results. Additionally, you get real-time insights into areas that affect the overall results and optimize accordingly. You can also：

• Identify how customers react to a campaign or products, which can help the product team make updates.
• Calculate or measure ROI from the campaign against others.
• Generate key customer insights like demographics, behavior, channels, and more for targeting new audiences.
• Demonstrate marketing impact to stakeholders and justify budget allocation.
• Improve your ROI predictions.
• Get insight to establish a competitive advantage.
• Engage in precision marketing, saving you the cost of multiple fault experiments.
• Gather data for effective decision-making.

Marketing Metrics vs KPIs Distinction

Imagine you have launched a marketing campaign to promote your HR SaaS startup product. Metrics are discrete variables like click-through rate (CTR), website traffic, social shares, and email open rates you track during the campaign. They offer insights into the different aspects of your campaign.

In contrast, KPIs are high-level variables like revenue generated, sales, ROI, and customer acquisition that become relevant at the end of the campaign. Unlike marketing metrics, KPIs are typically tied to strategic metrics. They are used to represent the most important measures of business, and in this case, marketing performance.

In simple terms, metrics in marketing give you a detailed understanding of the campaign, while KPIs show whether the campaign meets the broader business goals.

Types, Hierarchy, and Examples of Marketing Metrics

Depending on your marketing role, you will track varying metrics and use a marketing analytics tool to extract helpful insight for business success. These metrics fall under two categories, namely types and hierarchy.

Types of Marketing Metrics

Marketing metrics can be divided into four distinct types depending on the different stages of the customer's journey. They are:

• Awareness Metrics

Awareness marketing metrics measure how your message is being seen or heard. It often involves metrics like brand recall, brand recognition, share of voice, reach, and impressions.

• Engagement Metrics

Marketing engagement metrics provide insights into how your audience interacts with your campaign. Marketing metrics under this category include bounce rate, click-through rate (CTR), likes, shares, followers, media mentions, and press release pickups.

• Conversion Metrics

These types of metrics in marketing help you to understand how well your campaign performs in turning prospects into customers. Relevant conversion metrics include conversion rate, cost per conversion, and lead-to-customer conversion rate.

• Retention Metrics

These types of metrics in marketing measure customer satisfaction, loyalty, and long-term engagement. It helps you assess how well you retain and nurture existing customers. Some retention marketing metrics include customer retention rate, customer lifetime value (CLV), customer reviews, email click & open rate, and Net Promoter Score (NPS).

Hierarchy of Marketing Metrics

The hierarchy of marketing metrics focuses on the types of metrics and the specific stakeholder within the organization that needs information on that metrics. They include:

• Level 1 Marketing Metrics

Level 1 marketing metrics cover the metrics for measuring the overall success of the campaign. They are relevant to executives like CMOs to understand the business performance and health. Some examples of level 1 metrics are revenue, return on investment, and profitability.

• Level 2 Marketing Metrics

Level 2 marketing metrics are used by directors and focus on strategic touchpoints to understand the individual factors that determine campaign success.  Some examples include cost per visitor, and retention rates.

• Level 3 Marketing Metrics

This type of metrics focuses on the operational touchpoints of the marketing campaign that helps managers improve the conversion and sales efficacy of products across different customer segments. Examples include product-to-cart conversion, CPA by category, and new vs. repeat customer mix.

• Level 4 Marketing Metrics

These types of metrics are lower level touch points relevant to channel managers in understanding the effectiveness of each platform. Some metrics include traffic, conversion rate per channel, engagement, etc.

Quantitative vs. Qualitative Metrics

Generally, metrics can fall under two distinct categories in relation to the data collected. In this stage, we have the quantitative metrics with tangible or numeric data, and qualitative with mainly unstructured data like reviews. Imagine launching a digital marketing campaign for your Fintech brand. Your quantitative metrics will be website visitors, conversion rate, sales figures, etc. These data points are solid numbers showing how well your campaign is performing.

On the other hand, qualitative metrics will involve customers' comments, feedback, reviews, brand sentiment, and surveys. They are non-numeric and give you an understanding of the emotional impact of your products. Combining both equips you with balanced insights to optimize and improve campaign results and customer satisfaction.

Best Practices for Tracking Metrics in Marketing

Regarding marketing metrics, knowing what to track is a small part of the process. You also need to follow specific techniques and use the right tools. Some best practices to follow

• Set Clear Goals

Setting goals creates an organized metric tracking process. You can quickly identify what matters and remove vanity metrics from your focus. However, setting goals must be as transparent and centralized as possible to foster collaboration. You can use a tool like Kyligence Zen to create goals for your marketing strategy. This tool allows you to analyze data in one place. So, team members can view the goals and easily measure their performance to see if it aligns with the goal.

• Choose the Right Tools

When tracking metrics, the tools are as essential as the data. You should integrate tools like Google Analytics for campaign data, Salesforce for customer relationship management, and Kyligence Zen for centralized marketing metrics management and analysis. For example, using Kyligence Zen, you can set goals that’s accessible to all team members. It also allows you to see all your data from different marketing tools in one place, therefore simplifying the analysis process.  Combining these tools helps you get the right metrics and generate valuable insights supporting competitive advantage.

• Analyze Data and Extract Insights

In marketing, you must compare multiple touchpoints or metrics to get a general overview. That's why it's crucial to always use efficient tools to analyze the data collected from marketing campaigns. You can use Kyligence Copilot to get insights from your data by entering natural language commands. It's like chatting with a human analyst, allowing you to ask more in-depth questions and generate deeper insight as you please. For example, if you want to understand why a particular metric like website visitors is dwindling, you can ask the Kyligence copilot and it will deliver a simplified explanation that draws insight from all data points.

The Future of Marketing Metrics

Marketing analytics is evolving daily with the rise of emerging technologies like AI. While most regular metrics remain focus points, marketers are shifting towards more reliance on automation. Recent changes in the technology space, like the development of powerful generative AI tools like ChatGPT, also create a unique advantage for marketers. For example, we now have generative AI-powered marketing merits analysis tools that offer marketers a centralized area to collect, process, and extract insights from data.

There are more changes to come in the metrics marketing space. Marketers also pay more attention to qualitative metrics, as they provide the insight that drives personalized marketing efforts.

Marketing Analysis Made Easy with Kyligence

Marketing metrics are essential elements for driving successful business results. However, it's easy to lose sight of what's critical and chase vanity metrics that don't contribute to the bottom line. Therefore, understanding the different metrics for awareness stages, conversion, engagement, and retention gives you a unique advantage. But, making sense of this much data from other touchpoints can be daunting. That's why you have Kyligence Zen. With the AI-powered and central data collection features, you can simplify your marketing metrics analysis. Kyligence provides a dashboard to connect other tools like Google Analytics. It also offers you features to create goals and collaborate across different departments.

Additionally, you can save time writing complete SQL queries and generate meaningful insights by leveraging the power of Kyligence copilot. The most exciting part is that setting up these tools is simple and can be completed in a few clicks, even if you aren't tech-savvy. Kyligence makes marketing metrics analytics easy with its AI-powered features, and you can get started today. Sign up for a free trial to explore the personalized features it offers.