Marketing campaign performance metrics are critically important because they provide insights that can be used to influence future campaigns. The campaigns  should be measured both on their individual performance and in relation to other campaigns.

Campaign performance metrics consist of high-level results such as Leads Generated or Cost Per Opportunity, for example, as well as a myriad of more granular results such as Number of Webinar Attendees, Social media followers, etc.

Why measure campaign performance?

• Understand which campaign attributes performed the best
• Learn how your target audience engaged with the campaign
• Apply valuable learnings to future campaigns

Your CRM and email automation platform should be equipped to track traditional sales activity KPIs such as sales funnels movements, win/loss ratios, number of calls made, number of appointments booked, etc.,. These will ultimately optimize the sales process and ensure that they are prioritizing the activities that are contributing to new business wins.

Many of these metrics should also be viewed through a marketing lens. For example: What marketing activities drove those appointments? What was marketing's attribution to the won deals?

Why measure sales activities?

• Identify your highest-performing sales activities
• Share best practices across the sales team
• Apply valuable learnings into the sales process
• Align sales successes with marketing programs

As CMOs have been shifting  more dollars from offline to online digital marketing strategies, they are finding themselves with more marketing analytics data than they know what to do with.

One type of metric that cannot get lost in the shuffle are conversions. You may be gaining followers on Linkedin or getting more video views, but if those activities are not creating marketing qualified leads and conversions, then the tactics and investments supporting those need to be re-evaluated.

What ultimately matters is a new contact that is converted into a Sales Qualified Lead, an opportunity or a customer.

Why measure conversion?

• Understand the mix of marketing assets and personas that are converting
• Measure marketing's contribution across various attribution models
• Optimize marketing campaigns and cost per acquisition

Your website will, in many cases, be your prospect's first introduction to your company, and most of them will conduct online research before they will even talk to you.

That's why it's so important to maintain the content on your website to make it's current, and evolving along with what your business is learning about your ideal prospect profile and  their buying personas.  So, if for example, you see a decline in "time spent on web page," it may be time to do a bit of competitor research and update your content.

That's not to discount the importance of SEO, which is equally important in measuring your website traffic and continually growing that traffic. All of these metrics relating to traffic, session duration, bounce rates, traffic sources, conversions, etc., are important for different reasons.

Why measure Website and SEO?

• Educate your prospects and thereby gain their trust
• Maintain your competitive edge with relevant content
• Refine SEO strategies and drive traffic that converts

In this context, Cost Per Acquisition, or "CPA," is a marketing metric that measures the cost of a marketing campaign to acquire a paying customer. differing from the overall Cost of Acquiring Customer (CAC), due to its marketing-specific  application.

The term "campaigns" can be a broad term. It may be a trade show campaign—a very expensive initiative—but one that may overflow your sales pipeline and influence a significant amount of new revenue. Or it may be a Webinar campaign—a much less expensive initiative—that perceivably has less impact on revenue.

More often than not, it's multiple-touch-points that impact revenue over the long term, so calculating your CPA can be a granular exercise, and today's martech tools make it possible.

Why apply CPA analytics to your business?

• It will improve marketing ROI
• It can determine an acceptable CPA (in conjunction with Customer Lifetime Value, CLV metrics)
• It will enable more accurate financial forecasts

According the HubSpot, "Marketers need to be experts in understanding which channels are generating leads and converting customers most successfully and why.

"They need to accurately predict the impact of increased or decreased spend on these channels in order to execute a good marketing strategy. And with multiple engagement points, and buyers journeys becoming increasingly complex, it becomes much harder for marketers to have this visibility."

The martech tools that are now available enable marketers to analyze marketing attribution data at very granular levels.

Attribution can be analyzed against individual contacts, specific content and opportunities, and they can be viewed by a wide range of attribution models such as Linear, First interaction, multi-touch points, and others.

Why measure attribution?

• Gain deep insights into the marketing mix that ultimately win deals
• Refine content strategies and focus on content that converts
• Adjust marketing budgets to attract contacts that become customers
• Justify marketing investments

CMOs rely on their staff to execute effective marketing campaigns and to continually improve the performance of those campaigns.

They can use campaign performance data to establish marketing goals and establish KPIs for their staff. SMART goals are measurable and marketing analytics provide the tools CMOs need to measure goals and staff performance.

Specific goals can be established and measured for each marketing discipline ranging from social media followers and CTA clicks to Cost Per Acquisition and marketing attribution.

How do marketing analytics help measure staff performance?

• Staff bonuses and salary reviews can be tied to marketing KPIs
• Weekly staff meetings can be organized around campaign performance
• Marketing teams will have a crystal clear understanding of their role

Marketing ROI is probably one of the most important metrics for a CMO. They are being bombarded with new martech tools and constantly getting pitched about why some new and shiny marketing technology tool is a 'must-have.' And at the same time, these same CMOs are feeling organizational pressure on their P&Ls and constantly defending their strategies and their spending.

Everyone trusts data, and they find it hard to argue with the facts.

That's why CMOs and marketing teams must have ROI data. It drives decision making relating to trying new apps (martech tools), creating new campaigns, growing the staff, defending the budget, and much more.

Why measure ROI?

• Influence the marketing budget
• Plan for human and technology resources
• Justifying marketing spend to upper management