What metrics should go on a monthly B2B marketing KPI dashboard?
As a B2B marketer, it's essential to measure the success of your marketing efforts to understand what's working and what's not.
But the ever-increasing complexity of marketing has created a bewildering number of key performance indicators (KPIs) that can be tracked.
However, it's essential to be strategic about the metrics you choose to track. A dashboard full of confusing or meaningless metrics is even more counterproductive than no dashboard.
To help guide my efforts, here is the standard SaaS B2B KPI dashboard I use to track success across the funnel; it's broken down into these four key areas:
Monthly marketing demand gen pipeline
Sales Development Representative (SDR) performance
Website, email metrics, and advertising metrics
PR and social media metrics
Monthly marketing demand gen pipeline
Monitoring your demand-gen pipeline is crucial for marketing teams. It consists of 3 stages:
Leads: This is a raw inquiry from a marketing tactic.
Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs): These are qualified leads that marketing nurtures but are not yet ready for sales.
Sales Qualified Leads (MQLs): These are sales-ready leads.
Leads are filtered and segmented based on various criteria, and the KPIs monitored are monthly volume, cost per lead, and goal percentage should be monitored in all stages.
Leads
# of New Leads
Avg. Cost Per Lead
% on Goal
Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs)
# of New MQLs
Avg. Cost Per MQL
% on Goal
Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs)
# of New SQLs
Avg. Cost Per SQL
% on Goal
Sales Development Representative (SDR) performance
Marketing's job doesn't end at lead generation. It's essential to monitor the performance of the SDR team and use that feedback to optimize your marketing. Monitoring these KPIs is essential for optimizing marketing efforts.
The key metrics to track include the following:
# of Calls/Emails
# of Appointments
% On Goal
% Inbound/Outbound
Regular meetings with the SDR team and verbal feedback are also important.
Website, email metrics, and advertising
Monitoring core digital marketing channels' KPIs, such as website, email, and advertising, is crucial for digital marketing success. In this example, the assumption is that the majority of advertising is direct response through SEM and social.
Website
# of Orangic Website Session
# of Formfills/Leads
Conversion rate
# of Emails Sent
% Delivered
% Opened
SEM/Advertising
# of Clicks:
Avg. CPC:
# of Leads
If you do brand advertising, that should be included in the next section.
PR and social media
PR and social media metrics, such as media briefings, mentions, and articles, are essential to track to gauge brand promotion and audience engagement.
Social media metrics such as followers, engagements, and podcast downloads should also be monitored. If you spend on brand advertising, you include those metrics here.
PR
# of Media Briefings
# of Mentions
# of Articles
Social
# of Followers
# of Engagements
# of Podcast Downloads
By aligning your team and executive leadership around these metrics, you can create a shared understanding of what you're working towards and how to achieve your goals.
Adjustments to this dashboard
Keep in mind that the example is a generic B2B dashboard for a typical enterprise-focused SaaS company. Here are some adjustments that one may consider to tailor this to your company:
Self-service: If your SaaS product allows SMBs to sign-up independently, you will want to track those funnel metrics. Include these metrics in the demand gen pipeline section.
Advertising metrics: If you have a large advertising budget, you will want to understand the performance by channel and may even build a custom attribution model to measure performance.
Event sponsorships and trade: If most of your marketing spend is on event sponsorships and trade, you will want to create a separate dashboard for those metrics.
