Metrics Your SaaS Business Should Be Measuring

What if your business never saw the forest for the trees?

Many businesses are like this because they only focus on measuring leads. In reality, there are plenty of marketing metrics to pay attention to in addition to leads.

What are those metrics, and why are they important to your business? We’ll discover how to create reliable inbound marketing.

Amount of Comments

If you hang out on the internet long enough, you hear some important advice: "avoid the comment section." This advice is good for users because comment sections are often full of empty debate and toxic users.

To a business, though, the comments are very informative. If you have a high number of comments on an article, it indicates a high level of engagement from your users.

You can also keep track of criticisms that readers leave. While you don't need to get caught up in one or two negative comments, it's important to recognize and measure patterns of criticism and take the opportunity to improve your products and services.

Return On Marketing Investment

All business comes down to the bottom line. It's not enough to throw money at your marketing campaigns and hope something happens. You need to make sure you're getting your money's worth out of these various campaigns.

That's why you should keep track of your Return On Marketing Investment (ROMI). To figure this out, take your income from marketing, subtract your cost of goods and other marketing expenditures, and then divide by the cost of the marketing expenditures. Finally, multiply by 100.

Pay very close attention to this final number. If it is less than 100, your marketing is not turning a profit and is actually costing your business money. If it's more than 100, though, you know your efforts are yielding profit.

Conversion Rate

What's the real goal of all those leads you're getting from great lead forms? Simple: you want to convert as many of them as possible. That's why it's important to keep an eye on your conversion rate.

To do this, you want to collect as much data as possible about which marketing efforts led to clicks and which clicks led to conversions. Your goal is to determine which of your marketing efforts are performing better, allowing you to focus more of your time and attention on such efforts in the future.

It can take a bit of time to collect all the info you need. But once you can divide your conversions by leads, you are in a position to make your marketing efforts stronger than ever.

Bounce Rate

When you think about it, most marketing efforts are very optimistic. We focus on providing the content and experiences that will captivate and then convert anyone who visits our websites.

However, you need to also keep track of the bounce rate. It's important to know how many customers each month landed on your website, didn't click on anything, and then backed out.

By studying the bounce rate, you can learn some valuable info. For example, a high bounce rate may reflect poor content quality. In other words, the people clicking on your site may not find your content interesting or engaging.

A high bounce rate may also indicate that your SEO is bringing an incompatible audience to your site. In that case, it's worth investing in greater audience analytics and better SEO.

Amount of Shared Content

Earlier, we touched on the fact that online comments help you measure audience engagement. Another good way to do this is to measure how much of your content your audience has shared.

This is especially easy to do via social media. If you see that something has been retweeted hundreds or even thousands of times, then you know that you've struck a chord with the audience.

This is one of the most important marketing metrics because enthusiastic customers can serve as your brand ambassadors online. Provide the right content, and they will do much of the marketing "heavy lifting" for you!

If, however, you see that your posts are getting far fewer retweets and shares than usual, it may be a sign that you're no longer giving this core audience what they really want.

Customer Referrals

Customer referrals are a curious thing. On one hand, businesses have relied on customer referral incentive programs for the better part of a century. On the other hand, most businesses don't maximize the potential of referrals because they fail to keep track of them.

Digital marketing makes it easier than ever to actually track those referrals, especially for B2B companies. And when you have that number, you can divide your total customers up by the number of referrals to discover your referral rate.

Try tweaking your incentive programs until this referral rate begins to grow. Getting more customers is definitely worth the modest cost of incentive rewards.

Growth Rate

Not all of the metrics worth tracking are very complex. In fact, one of the best marketing metrics is also one of the simplest: your growth rate.

Beyond the hyper-specific metrics like the ROMI, it's important to keep track of the overall growth of your business. And this can be as simple as keeping track of items sold and overall profits from quarter to quarter and year to year.

If you see the rate dip down, you should assess what the true cause is. Sometimes, this cause may be largely out of your hands (like the COVID-19 pandemic). Other times, it may be that changes to your products, services, and marketing have negatively affected your growth.

Long story short? If you see your growth rate steadily rising, then you know you're doing something right!

Ad Impressions

PPC programs are one of the best ways to drive additional traffic to your website. To get the most out of PPC, though, you need to keep track of your various ad impressions.

That means checking out how many times your ad has appeared in paid searches and third-party sites. While this number is only one piece of the puzzle, it can help you determine the growing consumer awareness of your brand.

With the Google Display Network, you should also stick with cost per thousand impressions (CPM). This helps you only pay when a consumer sees a particular ad, helping you build brand awareness without breaking the bank.

Customer Acquisition Cost

Some of the marketing metrics are more sobering than others. However, it's still important to keep track of them. And customer acquisition cost is at the top of that list.

To discover this number, you add up all of your marketing costs (the overhead, the salaries...leave nothing out). And then you divide those costs by your number of customers.

You can do this each month. If you spend $20,000 and bring in 20 customers, then your customer acquisition cost for that month was $1,000.

Only you can determine how much is "too much" when it comes to customer acquisition costs. But every business has a vested interest in driving this number down each month!

Reviews and Testimonials

If you haven't done so already, you should add a section to your website for customer reviews and testimonials. And whether you add one or not, customers are likely leaving reviews for you in places like Yelp and Google Reviews.

It's important to keep track of such reviews and testimonials. That's because modern consumers typically don't make a purchase without seeing what other customers have to say about your business. In fact, 97% of people seek out product reviews before buying a product!

By adding your own testimonial section and tracking other reviews, you can help control the narrative regarding your company. And as with user comments, these reviews provide a great opportunity to discover where your company can improve its products and services to better meet consumer demand.

Retention Rates

If we're being honest, many businesses have a narrow vision of the marketing process. They tend to view customer conversions as the "happily ever after" of the marketing process.

In reality, though, retention rates are just as important as conversion rates. It's not enough to gain a customer if you immediately lose them!

Try to track this retention rate from month to month, and closely monitor whether it goes up or down. And if you haven't done so already, consider instituting referral programs and customer loyalty programs to further solidify your retention rates.

Click-Through Rate

Social media marketing is more important than ever. But to discover how effective your own marketing is, you must calculate your click-through rate (CTR).

This measures how many users who see your ad in places like Facebook actually click on it. Unfortunately, the CTR rate is typically very low--lower, in fact, than 1%.

As a general goal, it's good to try to increase your CTR. Try to measure CTR against your impressions. If you have many impressions and the CTR is still low, it means that users are seeing your ads and not clicking.

If that's the case, try changing up your social media ads to see if this improves the user response.

Marketing Metrics: What Comes Next?

Now you know about the marketing metrics to keep track of besides leads, but do you know where to start? If you need help measuring these metrics and implementing marketing strategies that signify growth, see how we can revolutionize your B2B Saas marketing. Contact us today!