5 Marketing Metrics Every Smart B2B CEO Should Measure

As a business owner, I am always looking for ways to measure and monitor my business so I know what is going on and can respond accordingly. I have financial metrics, operational metrics, sales metrics, and yes, marketing metrics. Smart CEOs know if you can’t measure it – you can’t manage it.

Let’s take a look at the marketing metrics every B2B CEO should be tracking:

1. Total website visits
2. Visits by source
3. Visit-to-lead conversions
4. Landing page conversions
5. Lead-to-customer conversions

1. Total website visits

Total website visits is pretty straightforward. How many people are coming to your website each month? It’s important you look at trends (are you trending up or down) and be aware of seasonality inherent to your business. Year-over-year comparisons may be a more meaningful comparison than just looking at increase over prior-month. Increasing your website visits is an important indicator to the overall traction you are making in the marketplace.

2. Visits by source

Understanding where your website visits are originating is key to understanding how to proactively influence your traffic numbers. Knowing which portion of traffic is coming from organic search (i.e., Google), referral traffic, paid search, direct traffic, email marketing, social media or PR campaigns.

3. Visit-to-lead conversions

Lots of visitors to your website is nice (and it might feed your ego), but it’s more beneficial if you know who is visiting your site, right? Spectacular calls-to-action on your website – download a white paper, case study or view a how-to-video – are the lynchpin to generating leads. Entice your website visitor to download great content in exchange for their name and email address.

4. Landing page conversions

Know which landing page converts your visitors to leads is the next step to optimizing your content marketing efforts. Which white paper is resulting in the most leads? Are your visitors filling out the entire form – or abandoning halfway through? Which combination of design and copy elements will result in the highest conversions? Having tools in place to do A/B testing on landing pages will help you perfect the art and science of landing page conversions.

5. Lead-to-customer conversions

Ultimately, customers are the goal – not simply leads. To quantify the quality of leads brought in through your content marketing efforts – it’s important to have closed loop reporting in place to know which leads are converting into paying customers for your company.

If you are not purposeful about measurement in your marketing – you will never know what’s working – and what’s not. If you’re unsure about how to implement a system that can give you visibility into the metrics discussed here – let us know. We’d love to help.