It’s a challenge being in a marketing team. There is this constant pressure of not only driving revenue but also proving that it came directly from the efforts done through marketing activities. Not having the visibility of the marketing performance measurement will mean that you’ll struggle to prove the direct and indirect impact of the marketing campaigns on new leads, sales, and revenue.

If you measure marketing performance correctly, it will allow you to attribute revenue to your marketing campaigns and monitor success effectively. Sadly, most marketers don’t feel they are tracking the right KPIs – and rightly so. All of your marketing campaigns need to have a measurable ROI. While creativity is essential in marketing, you need to have clear processes and data behind it. 

For example, it’s useless to simply create a piece of marketing collateral, publish it, and just leave it as is. You’ll need to track and report the online and offline conversions to fully understand if the efforts are resulting in a positive impact. It’s fine to generate leads through form submissions, live chat, and phone calls, but are you doing effective marketing performance tracking of these leads through the entire customer journey? 

This is why we wanted to share some pro tips on how you can measure your marketing performance that’s foolproof. Let’s get started!

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Want to know the ways to measure marketing performance? Here are some of the main KPIs to get you started:

  • Return On Investment (ROI) – As highlighted in this article on our website, ROI is one of the most important KPIs, if not the most important for measuring marketing performance. ROI measures the financial return you get from your marketing efforts as compared to the cost of these efforts. With this KPI, you can assess the efficiency and profitability of your marketing campaigns, aiding your brand teams in planning their budgets and strategies for the future. ROI is calculated by dividing revenue by the marketing cost.
  • Cost per Acquisition (CPA) – This is another crucial KPI, which measures the cost incurred in acquiring a new customer. Monitoring CPA helps calculate the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and channels in attracting and eventually converting new customers. You can calculate cost per acquisition by dividing the marketing investment by the number of customers acquired from that activity.
  • Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) – This KPI tells you the what worth a customer is to your business. To calculate CLV, you will need to multiply the average purchase amount by the average purchase frequency. Doing this will get you the customer value figure. After this, you will have to multiply the customer value figure by the time a customer stays with you on average. The number you get from this calculation is the customer lifetime value. 
  • Conversion Rate – Another important KPI for measuring marketing performance is the conversion rate (CR). This KPI measures the visitors or leads that are converted into the actions desired. Some common actions include purchases, sign-up, or demo calls booked, etc.
  • Traffic (web, social) –  The traffic coming to your website or social media highlights the effectiveness of your organic as well as paid marketing strategies. For example, if you don’t see much traffic coming through to your website from search, that can signal a need for better SEO optimization. If you are not seeing traffic coming to your website from your social media posts, that can indicate a need to revise your content strategy.
  • Engagement Rate – Engagement rates are collection of actions users take when they interact with your brand. In case of a website, engagement rates can include things like scrolling through pages and spending time during a session. On the other hand, for social media, this can be include the number of likes, comments, and shares your posts get. This can then inform you on the type of value-adding content to create for your customers.

Best Tools for Gathering Marketing Data


Google Analytics 4

Google Analytics 4, or simply GA4 is one of the most widely used tools for measuring marketing performance. The best part? It’s free! Your company should use this tool, even if you’ve got access to other analytical tools. GA4 is great for tracking how your users interact with your site and any paid campaigns. Some of the key interactions GA4 tracks include:

  • Event Hits – This includes a specific action your users take on your web page, including clicking a specific button.
  • Traffic Acquisition – This gives you a view of how your customers found you and came to your website. Some common channels for acquisition include direct, organic (search), social media, affiliates, email marketing, etc.
  • Purchases – This shows every time a visitor purchases your product or service.

You can set marketing goals in GA4 that will allow you to see how many users visit a specific page and how many visitors take a particular action. With the help of GA4, you can also generate reports on your site’s health and performance against goals. By the way, if you use Salesforce CRM, you can integrate that with GA4 with GA Connector within minutes.

Google Search Console

Another valuable (and free!) tool from Google is the Google Search Console (GSC). This tool helps you track your site’s organic performance, allowing you to determine the effectiveness of your SEO strategies. GSC lets you check if Google has crawled and indexed your websites, which is crucial for appearing in search results. Moreover, you can see data related to the site’s performance in search, such as:

  • Total number of clicks and impressions
  • The average Click-Through Rate (CTR)
  • The website’s position in search results
  • Which search queries include your site

With the help of GSC, you can also get information on other elements that are influencing your search rankings, including any security issues, which sites link to yours, and your site’s mobile friendliness.

Google Ads

Google Ads is the leading pay-per-click (PPC) platform where you can advertise through the pay-per-click (or impression) model for ads. Google Ads is great for driving qualified traffic and customers who are a good fit. Within the platform, there is also the possibility to analyze and optimize these ads over time to reach more people. Moreover, it also allows you to analyze keywords and search traffic to build a strong search ad strategy. 

With Google Ads being around for about 2 decades, this is one platform to have in your arsenal of paid advertising and measuring marketing performance success.

Meta Pixel (Facebook Pixel)

Meta Pixel is a code that can be placed on the website to collect data that helps you track conversions from ads on Facebook and Instagram. Formerly known as Facebook Pixel, this code also allows you to optimize your ads, build target audiences for future campaigns, and remarket to people who have already shown interest in your products and services (they visited your website and took some action like adding items to the cart).

Meta pixels work by placing and triggering cookies that track users as they interact with you on Facebook, Instagram, and out of these platforms. For example, someone sees an ad for your upcoming training on Instagram. They click the link to the training and add it to the shopping cart. Now if they don’t go ahead and make the purchase due to any reason, they can be specifically reached out to with the help of remarketing (possible because of the Meta Pixel).

Linkedin Insights

LinkedIn is an important social media platform for B2B businesses. As marketers, we want to understand the data and turn that understanding into actions. This is what LinkedIn Insights provides you for the social media platform for professionals. With the Advertising Insights within the platform, you get a view of which campaigns are working and how the users interact with your brand. 

Having a view of the advertising insights can be very beneficial for conversion-focused campaigns such as lead-gen ads, where you prompt a user to take an action in exchange for a required (lead magnet).

Microsoft Clarity\Hotjar

Tools like Microsoft Clarity and Hotjar give you a view of how users are interacting with a specific landing page on your website. You can study the user clicks and scrolls. These tools allow you to visualize and map out the user engagement in the form of heatmaps, recording their sessions and tracking all actions they take (which CTA buttons they click more, how much of the page they scroll, etc). You can gain insights from things like:

  • Heatmaps
  • Surveys
  • Form Analysis
  • Conversion Funnel Reports
  • Feedback Polls
  • Visitor Recordings

While heatmaps get a lot of attention, other super-valuable tools within Hotjar include conversion funnel reports, feedback polls, surveys, and form analysis. All these advanced features are useful in determining if your users are finding what they need on your website. They also give you visibility of where the biggest dropoffs occur. Why does this matter? Since this is reported to you in the form of honest feedback, it is direct access to your users and you can hear from them and what they like or dislike about your website. 

How to Optimize Marketing Costs Based on Performance

While some of the metrics to measure marketing performance we’ve mentioned above seem obvious and easy to comprehend, it is equally important to connect the dots and go beyond just the numbers to provide the context. To better track the important metrics, you will need to connect all this marketing data with your CRM. 

A lead might come through paid advertising activities but eventually convert through a different web session. With CRM integration, you’ll be able to understand the entire journey of the customer, giving proper weight to all the steps and channels involved. To optimize your marketing costs, you will need to understand not only how users are interacting with your marketing campaigns, but also how they interact with the sales channels. 

With the help of CRMs, you have better synergy between marketing and sales, bridging any loopholes that might exist otherwise. GA Connector can integrate key analytics tools like GA4 with your CRM in a few clicks, giving you better visibility and more control when planning your marketing campaigns.   

Common Mistakes to Avoid in Measuring Marketing Performance

With all the influx of data and metrics at your disposal, it also becomes easier to make mistakes when measuring marketing performance. Here are some things to avoid:

  • Relying on vanity metrics – Vanity metrics are any metrics that make you look good but in reality aren’t reflective of the real performance of your marketing activities. These metrics are often exciting to look at and share with the wider team since they give you the impression that things are improving. However, these tend to be uncontrollable and often difficult to repeat. For example, followers on social media. While the number looks great, what matters is how many of these followers are engaged. 
  • Focusing too much on a single metric – Another common mistake that marketers and business make is stressing too much importance on one single metric. This tunnel vision makes it difficult to have a view of the marketing strategy as a whole. For example, you might be too focused on driving traffic to the website. However, what is equally important is the quality of this traffic. Just driving more sessions that result in a spike in bounce rate is not helpful. 
  • Lack of integration across channels – Your marketing strategy needs to be integrated across platforms and channels. This means that the experience you provide to a user on your website should continue with them even when they interact with you on other channels. A good example of this is how having Meta Pixels on your website allows you to track your users. It is the integration across channels in this instance that allows you to reach out to your customer with the most relevant and valuable message, even when they are not on your website.
  • Poor data quality – If you are not getting good quality, well-filtered data, you will end up making a lot of wrong marketing and business decisions. This leads directly to flawed analysis and lost revenue. For example, if your marketing campaign and analysis are based on faulty data, you will not reach potential customers and miss out on conversions. 
  • Not using data tracking software –  You need to use data tracking software to obtain correct information running digital ads effectively. Such software also helps with better behavioral tracking and precise audience segmentation. You don’t just want to target everyone – you want to target the people who are most likely to convert.
  • Making decisions too fast – They say ‘haste makes waste,’ and there’s some truth to that. For example, SEO strategies take time to track and show impact. If you’re too impatient and stop putting in effort just because your website didn’t improve its ranking in search after a few weeks of optimization, you’re making a big mistake.

Final Words

The best way to understand if your marketing strategy is effective is to connect the dots between your activities and the revenue they generate. Use a variety of analytical tools at your disposal and look at how your marketing efforts are working as a whole rather than getting distracted or too focused on one single metric. 

Check us out to see how GA Connector can help you integrate your CRM with Google Analytics, providing you better visibility of your customers and where they are in their journey. Want more inspiration to get you started? Read our blog post on the 7 best strategies to track marketing success.