Measuring ROI in B2B Digital Marketing: Key Metrics to Track for Success in 2023

It’s 2023 and it’s as important as ever to measure the return on investment (ROI) of your digital marketing campaigns or any advertising effort to determine effectiveness.  It’s also key to making informed decisions about future marketing strategies. But, with so many metrics to consider, knowing which ones to focus on and how to interpret them can be challenging. In this article, I’ll outline some key metrics to measure the ROI of your B2B digital marketing campaigns and provide real-life examples to illustrate their importance.

Conversion rates, in my opinion, are the most important metrics to measure the ROI of your B2B digital marketing campaigns. Conversions are defined by the number of website visitors who take a desired action, such as filling out a form or making a purchase. By tracking conversion rates, you can see which marketing channels and campaigns are driving the most conversions, and adjust your strategy accordingly. For example, if you find that your email marketing campaigns have a higher conversion rate than your social media campaigns, you may want to allocate more resources to email marketing.  

A side note about conversion tracking.

With all the changes to data privacy, the ability to accurately track conversions is challenging.  These are the best practices that will help you figure out what sources are bringing in sales:

Make sure that you have conversion tracking set up for each of your sources. This will typically involve placing a tracking pixel or code snippet on your website or landing page, which will capture information about each conversion (such as the source, campaign, and conversion value).  

Use UTM parameters: UTM parameters are tags that you can add to your URLs to help identify the source and campaign of each visitor. This will allow you to see which sources are driving the most conversions, and which campaigns are performing best. Many social media and email marketing programs automatically add UTM tracking to links so your tracking platform will capture the information.

There are several platforms available that can help you track conversions from multiple sources, such as Google Analytics. With tracking, you can get detailed insights into your conversion data, which allows you to analyze and optimize your campaigns accordingly.  HubSpot analytics also provides good tracking information for any email and forms.  

Another important metric to consider is cost per lead (CPL), which measures how much it costs to acquire a new lead. This includes the cost of advertising, content creation, and any other expenses associated with your marketing campaigns. By tracking CPL, you can see which campaigns are most cost-effective, and adjust your budget accordingly. For example, if your paid search campaigns have a lower CPL than your display advertising campaigns, you may want to shift your budget toward paid search.

In addition to conversion rate and CPL, it’s important to track your customer acquisition cost (CAC), which measures how much it costs to acquire a new customer. This includes all of the expenses associated with your marketing campaigns, as well as sales and support costs. By tracking CAC, you can see which campaigns are generating the most profitable customers, and adjust your strategy accordingly. For example, if you find that your content marketing campaigns are generating customers with a lower CAC than your paid advertising campaigns, you may want to invest more in content marketing.

Finally, it’s important to track the lifetime value (LTV) of your customers, which measures how much revenue a customer generates over the course of their relationship with your business. Some businesses don’t see much repeat business by nature, large construction projects or equipment manufacturers may only have a single customer purchase once every three to five years.  In this case, the LTV may be better quantified by tracking the number of referrals from those customers.  

By tracking LTV, you can see which marketing channels and campaigns are generating the most valuable customers, and adjust your strategy accordingly. For example, if you find that customers who sign up through your email marketing campaigns have a higher LTV than customers who sign up through social media, you may want to invest more in email marketing. And, following the example above, tracking referral sources can also lead to more relationship-building campaigns that recognize and reward customer referrals.

Return on investment is the most important factor to determine the success of any marketing campaign. As you can see, there are several key performance indicators to track.  Tracking success, and failures, will help you better target where to use marketing dollars which will make your promotional efforts more cost-effective and, as a result, save money by optimizing your marketing strategy.