“I don’t know.” That’s not what you want to say when your boss asks how things are going with the company’s marketing metrics. Even so, it’s easy to clam up about when you feel put on the spot.

You spend all of your time in the details of marketing, but your boss wants you to share the big picture. Your boss is going to want a general vision of how things are going, rather than a detailed tale of everything you’ve done in the past month.

She’ll want to know what metrics are improving, how customer acquisition and retention are faring, and what you’ve been doing to make improvements. As a marketer, you should know a few marketing metrics– or at least how to retrieve them– so that you’re prepared when someone asks for the big picture.

Knowing the metrics will help show the results of your efforts. After all, 43% say that proving the ROI of marketing activities is the number one challenge for their team.

Here are some marketing metrics worth sharing with your boss:

Overall engagement on site

Believe it or not, 55% of B2B marketers say they aren’t sure what content marketing success looks like, according to Content Marketing Institute. However, overall engagement on site is one of the best ways to figure out the ROI of your efforts.

When your boss walks up to your desk and asks how things are going, there are a few metrics you should always have on hand. According to HubSpot, 65% of companies are challenged to generate traffic and leads, so this is likely to be a concern for those up top.

Many marketers create custom dashboards in Google Analytics or Excel so that these metrics are always available.

Shareable metrics include:

  • Number of site visitors (daily, weekly, monthly)
  • Growth of site visitors
  • Overall conversion rate (how many people who visit the site convert?)
  • Time on site (this shows whether people are reading your content)
  • Number of pages visited
  • Most popular pages
  • How people get to the site

You’ll also want to have a good understanding of overall website conversion rate. According to SixteenVentures, the average conversion rate for SaaS is 3%. Are you performing better or worse than the average?

Conversion rates from particular campaigns and strategies

When you create a new campaign or initiative, you also have to be sure you have taken the steps to measure success. What will success look like? Is it the number of generated leads? Is it simply brand awareness?

It’s not only a question of your goals, but also how you will measure them. When someone downloads an eBook, are you able to track how they found the eBook, and what happened after they downloaded it?

You should know:

  • How many leads were generated from particular channels
  • How many social media shares a content marketing asset received
  • Conversions from organic search vs. other mediums

Be able to share conversion rates from particular campaigns and strategies. It can help to put things in context. For example, if your manager wants to know why a new blog post isn’t gaining views compared to an older one, you can explain that only 1 in 10 blog posts are compounding, meaning organic search increases their traffic over time, according to HubSpot.

Changes over time

It’s easy to look at your marketing efforts and say that things were going better than they were in the past, but you actually need to be able to document changes over time. Then, you can share them.

For example, if you were hired to run your company’s blog, and you’ve increased time on site by a full minute, that’s a metric worth sharing with your manager. Similarly, if there are changes in how people are interacting with your site– perhaps the percentage of visitors who come through mobile– you should be able to share them.

Cost-per-acquisition based on channel

One thing your manager definitely cares about is how much it costs to acquire a customer. You should have a handle on how much it costs to acquire a customer for each marketing and advertising channel, as well as the customer lifetime values for each channel.

  • Cost-per-acquisition – How much it costs to acquire a customer
  • Customer lifetime value – Average amount that a customer spends with your company

You may find that you get a lot of conversions from Facebook ads, which are inexpensive to run. However, if everyone that signs up from a Facebook ad only hangs around for a month, are you truly getting a return on your investment? Perhaps your money is better spent on organic search efforts, where it costs slightly more to gain a customer, but the customers stay around for longer.

Wrapping up

Don’t get caught on the spot when someone asks what’s going on with your marketing efforts. Instead, be prepared. Be ready to share metrics around the overall engagement on your site, conversion rates, changes over time, as well as the relationship between your cost-per-acquisition and your customer lifetime value.

If your company has questions on marketing metrics, reach out to us! 

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