Marketing Metrics That Matter


Use these six metrics to communicate the success of your marketing efforts to your boss.

If you are responsible for marketing for your company, you may feel that your tireless efforts are sometimes difficult to quantify to your boss. Much of what we in marketing do is behind the scenes, measured by myriad metrics that demonstrate our strategies are at work. Oftentimes, those metrics do not necessarily speak the same language as our boss.

We are motivated by website visits, conversion rates, generated leads per channel, engagement on social media platforms, blog post shares, email click-through rates, and many other methods that can illustrate the success of today’s marketing campaign. But when you are trying to present the impact of your marketing strategies to your boss, it is hard to demonstrate all of this with measurable results.

You probably sense this, too — a sort of unspoken question mark hanging in the thought bubble over your boss’ head. You share that email click-through rates went up 40%, and there is a blank expression on his or her face. You suspect your boss may not fully appreciate the importance or the overall impact of your work.

And you are probably correct. Bosses theoretically understand that a solid marketing team can directly impact your company’s bottom line, but a whopping 73% of executives don’t believe that marketers are focused enough on results to truly drive incremental customer demand.

Your boss is looking for marketing metrics that matter to him or her, ones that they clearly see a result (or a connection) in customer acquisition or increased sales. This means you must be prepared to report on data that deals with the total cost of marketing, salaries, overhead, revenue, and actual new customer acquisitions.

Six Marketing Metrics Your Boss Wants To Know

There are basically six marketing metrics that your boss is interested in. Here is a brief overview:

  1. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): This is a metric used to determine the average amount your company spends acquiring a new customer. Take what your company spends in marketing costs, divided by the number of new customers it produced. There you have the price of each new customer.
  2. Marketing Percentage of CAC: This is taking your marketing department costs and dividing it by the total cost of both sales and marketing to determine how much your company is spending on marketing as it relates to the what you spend to acquire new customers. A low marketing percentage of CAC shows that your marketing programs are relatively inexpensive for the results they are producing.
  3. Ratio of Customer Lifetime Value to CAC: This is an estimate of total value that your company derives from each customer, compared with what you spend to acquire that new customer.
  4. The Time to Payback CAC: This calculation demonstrates how many months it takes for your company to earn back the CAC it spent acquiring your new customers.
  5. Marketing-Originated Customer Percentage: This takes all of the new customers from a set time period and examines what percentage of them started with a lead generated by your marketing team.
  6. The Marketing-Influenced Customer Percentage: This is a metric that highlights all of the new customers that marketing interacted with while they were leads, anytime during the sales process.

When reporting to your boss about the most recent marketing results, it’s crucial to convey your performance in a way in which he or she can quantify the results in terms of impact to the company. Rather than focusing on “soft” metrics like per-post Facebook engagement, use the top six metrics that demonstrate how the marketing efforts led to new customers and what those customers are worth to the company’s growth and success.

For more tips on how to calculate and demonstrate theses metrics, download our cheat sheet on how to show your boss the measurable value of your marketing strategies.

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