Top Metrics to Track in Lead Generation Success
By Aleena Kulsoom, Campaign Operations Manager at Accelera
Reporting – you either love it or you hate it.
Either you’re one of those people who gets excited at the thought of diving into the numbers, extracting your golden data points and presenting them like a proud parent of a successful demand generation campaign.
Orrrr... you see post-campaign reporting as the chore your mum forced you to do after a super fun day out. The exciting creativity chunk is over, and this is the boring part.
Either way, it's something we all have to do to ensure we make some data-driven decisions.
How Reporting Boosts Desired Action?
It's well established that effective reporting transforms raw data into meaningful insights, empowering all teams to concentrate on the activities that truly drive results.
As per HubSpot's State of Marketing Report 2023, companies that actively track and optimise lead generation KPIs see 3X higher conversion rates and significantly increased revenue. And let’s be honest, conversion rates and revenue are the ultimate end goals for all of us; especially marketing teams tasked with turning strategy into sales.
Regular reporting gives clear visibility into what’s actually moving the needle across the customer journey, helping teams refine lead generation strategies, optimise their primary metrics, and support sales processes more effectively. For the marketers, it's not just about collecting data, it’s about using it consistently to get the best results, not just average ones.
Additionally, analysing your campaign performance helps in reporting back to stakeholders and those involved on it’s success and outcomes, and allows you to learn what you did well, and what you could improve on for future campaigns to accelerate your business growth.
But which figures and insights best reflect this impact? After all, we’re not just reporting for the sake of it—we want to clearly understand what we gained from running the campaign. How valuable are the results to the business, and were they worth the time and resources invested?
Here are some key performance indicators that should always be included to help you gauge how successful your campaigns are:
ROI - The Financial Barometer
In news that is shocking to none, the first and arguably most important metric in reflecting campaign success is Return on Investment (ROI). We hear it all too often as marketers.
ROI offers a clear perspective on revenue generation and profitability. It answers the fundamental question: “For every dollar I’ve spent on this campaign, how many am I getting back in total revenue?”.
A positive ROI indicates that the campaign is not just covering the total cost of running it, but also contributing to the financial health of the company.
Number of Leads – The Attraction Gauge
Leads are the bread and butter of B2B marketing efforts. The number of leads generated from your campaign shines a light on its effectiveness in attracting potential customers. If you set a lead goal at the beginning of the campaign, did you reach that goal? Did you over-deliver?
It can be useful to display the split of lead delivery across the timeline of the campaign being live. Identifying which stage most leads were delivered at can be a good way of judging your lead pacing, if you should introduce caps to even out delivery, or if you should brief your sales team to expect a heavier lead volume at a certain stage in the campaign cycle. It can also be helpful in assessing the popularity of different content pieces if they were changed throughout the course of the campaign.
It’s helpful to try and look further than simply the final number of leads delivered. By looking at the number at various stages throughout, you can expose strengths and weaknesses of aspects of the campaign that you may not have otherwise been aware of, driving better results.
Lead conversion rate – The Transformation Indicator
To nicely compliment the number of leads, its then a good idea to calculate the percentage of those leads that have converted to opportunities. This is one of the key metrics that shows how well your leads have performed past the delivery and through the initial sales funnel.
If your conversion rate is high, it's a strong indication that your campaign was well-targeted and set strong groundwork for further nurturing. A low conversion rate could mean that your content was perhaps not as engaging, or that your user-journey following a lead entering the CRM has to be revisited.
Cost per Lead – The Efficiency Metric
Digging further into the leads, another good measurement to feature in a campaign report is the cost per lead (CPL). By dividing the total campaign cost by the number of leads generated, we’re able to ascertain how cost-effectively we are acquiring new leads. A lower CPL indicates higher efficiency and an effective use of your budget.
If your campaign includes several different vendors or media partners, this metric can be a good comparison between them and the value of their leads.
Marketing Contributed Pipeline – The Sales Catalyst
To some people reading this, Marketing Contributed Pipeline (MCP) may be the most important metric they focus on during a campaign wrap-up report. This figure may not be available until a significant time after the campaign’s completion, but its importance cannot go unnoticed.
MCP underscores the campaign’s impact on the sales pipeline. Beyond conversion rate, it measures how many leads have been nurtured to the point of converting to customers and bringing in monetary value. This figure is a good indicator to see how effective is your marketing campaign and helps to identify which marketing channels are driving the most pipeline growth. Any stakeholders outside of the marketing organisation can use this metric to evaluate how marketing is contributing to the business as a whole. This figure is a concrete reflection of the end result of your lead generation campaign.
Lead demographic data
In conjunction with these hard metrics, it is often useful to include some descriptive stats about the nature of the leads that have been delivered from your campaign. Looking at account information of your target audience like company size, industry and revenue, and persona characteristics such as job titles and location can give a deeper insight into the type of audience your campaign was appealing to.
Depending on if you had established lead validation criteria prior to the campaign launch, digging into this sort of data can be helpful in assessing content performance and vendor performance if you were running a content syndication campaign.
Including such data about the nature of the leads can give insight into your brand awareness and visibility and which industries and demographics you’re reaching. They also give some variety to reports which may very number dense – a break from all the figures!
The Winning Combination
Hopefully you at least have an idea now of how to show the best bits of your marketing campaign results, if only we could present it for you too.
By including the right metrics mentioned above, your lead generation efforts should shine through. For industry professionals aiming to leverage marketing campaign metrics for heightened success, Accelera stands as a beacon of expertise and assistance.
With a track record of delivering high-quality content and strategic marketing solutions, Accelera is your partner in navigating the complexities of B2B marketing. If you're looking for a team that can help you to drive a customised reporting dashboard with all the essential metrics and valuable insights in it, get in touch with us today and get started on a journey of excellent lead quality and an effective lead generation process.