Marketing has never been short of data. From impressions and clicks to conversions, engagement rates and lifetime value, there’s no shortage of numbers telling you something about how your campaigns are performing.
But the challenge isn’t getting access to this data. It’s which areas you should be focused on monitoring and how to use that data to make informed decisions about your marketing activity.
Don’t track enough, and you risk missing important signals. Track too many, and you drown in dashboards that look impressive but are hard to understand and don’t change behaviour.
In this blog we’ll walk you through the key marketing KPIs worth tracking, how they fit together, and how to choose the right ones for your business and goals.
What are KPIs?
KPI stands for Key Performance Indicators. They’re the metrics that help you identify how your marketing is performing and whether it’s moving you closer to achieving your goals.
Without clear KPIs in place, your marketing performance can quickly become subjective. Decisions get driven by opinion rather than evidence, and success is often defined by surface-level indicators like ‘it felt busy’ or ‘engagement looked good’, rather than proven by hard data.
Well-chosen KPIs help you:
- Understand whether your campaigns are contributing to your business objectives
- Prioritise time and budget more effectively
- Identify what’s working and what isn’t
It’s worth remembering that not all metrics are KPIs. Marketing platforms provide an overwhelming amount of data, but very little guidance on what actually matters. A KPI should always answer a clear question and inform a decision. If a metric looks impressive on a dashboard but doesn’t change behaviour or strategy, it’s probably not a KPI.
How to choose the right KPIs for your business
Choosing the right KPIs is first about understanding what success looks like for your business and selecting metrics that reflect progress towards those goals. Taking the time to define the right KPIs from the outset, then setting benchmarks against them, can move your business beyond the metrics that don’t mean much, and give you actionable evidence that supports your long-term growth. Here’s a checklist of some of the KPIs you could monitor, by channel:
One of the more useful ways to look at KPIs is by separating them out into different groups, in line with your marketing funnel:
Website/Blog
- Total organic traffic
- Session duration / pages per session
- Bounce rate
- Conversion rate
- Domain authority
- Keywords/search visibility
Social Media
- Reach and impressions
- Engagement rate (likes, comments, shares, saves)
- Follower growth
- Click‑throughs to website
- Interaction quality
Email Marketing
- Open rate
- Click‑through rate
- List growth and list health (unsubscribes, bounces)
- Conversion rate from email
- Engagement by segment
PPC/Paid Ads
- Click‑through rate
- Cost per click
- Conversion rate
- Cost per acquisition
- Quality Score
Awareness
At this stage, your metrics will tell you whether people are noticing your brand. KPIs here could include impressions, reach or number of views.
Consideration
Here, you’ve hooked users into wanting to know more about your business. KPIs at this stage may be website visits, time on page or content downloads.
Conversion
One of the most important parts of the funnel, this stage is where your customers commit. This could be through an online purchase, a phone call query, or a form submission. KPIs to track here would be the number of leads, cost-per-acquisition (CPA) and sales revenue.
Retention
After the sale, KPIs like returning customers and customer lifetime value (CLV) show how effectively your marketing is building those crucial long-term relationships with your customers. Keep in mind that, in general, it’s easier to sell to existing customers than acquire new ones. Retention-focused metrics are often overlooked, but they’re essential for sustainable growth.
It’s easy to get lost in a sea of dashboards and reports, but the most effective KPIs are those that prompt action. So, ask yourself, ‘if this number changed, what would I do differently?”. For example:
- If your CTR is low or decreasing, you might test new messaging or new graphics..
- If your lead-to-customer conversion rate is falling, maybe your sales handoff or nurturing process needs adjusting.
- If your retention metrics drop, you could improve your onboarding process, loyalty programme, or customer support.
The main aim of KPIs isn’t just about reviewing the work and activity that’s already been delivered. They should help you make informed decisions about what you do next, just as much.
It’s important to remember that the KPIs you set today won’t necessarily be the KPIs you use further down the line. As your campaigns and business goals change, so should the KPIs you track. However, you’ll need to build at least a year’s worth of data before you can start to analyse any meaningful changes or trends. It’s a marathon, not a sprint.
How QBD helps you track the right KPIs
As a full‑service digital marketing agency that helps growing businesses make sense of their data and their strategy, we see firsthand how tracking the right KPIs can transform the performance of marketing activities.
Whether you’re refining your customer journey, testing new channels or aiming for growth milestones, focusing on the right KPIs will always pay off.
That’s where QBD Pulse comes in. It’s a strategic, scalable monthly marketing programme, built around your business goals, that gives you the content you need to achieve them, and the data to prove it’s working.
At its core, QBD Pulse combines regular content creation, social media activity and email marketing in a monthly cycle that keeps businesses in front of their ideal customers. Within this monthly marketing programme, we create regular reports that pull in your agreed KPIs and clear graphs and tables of data, so you have a clear view of how your marketing is performing and the impact it has on your business.
Reviewing performance consistently helps us spot the patterns that matter and make changes to your marketing campaigns accordingly.
Integrating KPIs across all your channels
Many businesses track KPIs separately by channel, but to get the full picture, it’s important to integrate them and look at the bigger picture. For example, a high number of social media impressions is great, but if it isn’t driving website visits or leads, it may not be helping your overall goals.
Building a cross-channel report that connects metrics across platforms would be a great place to start. This helps you see not only where performance is strong, but also how your marketing channels interact, such as whether your email campaigns drive repeat website visits, or if paid search leads to higher-quality conversions.
For many SMEs, building this kind of integrated reporting is time‑consuming and, often, unrealistic without a dedicated marketing function. With QBD Pulse, cross‑channel performance tracking is built into every programme. We handle all the technical setup, data connections and reporting logic behind the scenes, giving you a single, easy‑to‑understand monthly report that brings all your marketing metrics together in one place.
We see businesses obsessing over vanity metrics all the time, but they rarely move the bottom line on their own." “What matters is whether your marketing is driving revenue. Are people enquiring? Are those enquiries turning into sales? What’s the cost per acquisition? These are the numbers that tell you if your marketing budget is working hard or hardly working. “Tracking the metrics that connect directly to your business goals will tell you exactly where to focus your efforts and double down, and where to redirect your budget."
Give your business a Pulse
Successful marketing is all about being consistent, connecting with your audience and delivering value, day by day, week by week, month by month.
It’s all about showing up across all your marketing channels with regular content that engages and inspires your audience. QBD Pulse makes it easier to achieve. It’s a structured, strategic monthly marketing programme designed to keep your brand active and deliver results. So, if you’re looking for clarity in your marketing and want to learn more about how QBD Pulse can help, get in touch today.
About the authors
Jack Follis
Jack is a business growth specialist at QBD with a background in print and digital design. He works with businesses of all sizes to develop tailored marketing strategies. From branding and web design to SEO, content and paid ads.