What to Include on Your Marketing Scorecard

When developing a marketing plan, determining how you’ll measure the success of your activities is as important as identifying activities themselves. Are you making progress toward your marketing goals? Which activities are bringing in the most leads? Are people finding you on search?

Here are the key metrics to include on your marketing scorecard to help determine if you are focusing on the right activities and to ensure you are getting return on your marketing investment.

Web Performance Metrics

• Web sessions: 10-20% growth year over year
• Bounce rate: <60%
• Time on site: >2 minutes

Since your website is the hub of all inbound marketing efforts, web traffic is a staple on any marketing scorecard and a good measure of the overall health of your marketing program.

Going one step further, measuring bounce rate and session duration give you insight into how well you’re engaging your audience. Maintaining a bounce rate at or below 60% indicates visitors coming to your site are finding what they are looking for. Session duration, or time on site, tells you how well your content is doing to keep them there. Aim to maintain average session duration of at least 2 minutes.

Example Scorecard

SEO Performance

• Organic traffic as a percentage of overall: >50%
• Domain authority: incremental growth from where you are
• # of keywords you're ranking for: at least your top 5

Visitors who come to your site from organic search typically stay longer, engage more, and are more likely to become new contacts. Start from where you are, but aim to get to at least 50% and ideally 65% of your overall coming from organic search over time.

Other ways to measure your SEO efforts include monitoring how you are ranking for your top keywords and keeping an eye on your site’s domain authority. Domain authority is a score – on a scale of 1 to 100 – that Moz developed to predict how well your website will rank on search engine result pages. It takes a while to improve your domain authority score, so aim for an increase of 2-3 points per year.

Conversion Through the Funnel

• Web visits to leads
• Leads to MQLs
• MQLs to SQLs
• SQLs to opportunities
• Opportunities to customers

Are you moving the visitors who come to your site down the funnel? Full funnel reporting is the best way to tie revenue to marketing activity and to identify any trouble areas along the way.

Full Funnel Reporting

First, start tracking this to establish benchmarks and create a predictable model. Once you have that model, you can see the impact at each stage when you implement new activity to evaluate effectiveness.

This report is also a great tool to use to align marketing and sales goals, expectations, and handshakes and will help you determine when you may need to add additional activity to meet your goals.

Executing to the Plan

• Content publishing frequency
• Email and eNewsletter execution
• Monthly data-driven Web design updates

Not all your metrics have to be numeric. If consistently creating content is an important goal for you, for example, it may be worth putting on the scorecard even if the success measure is just yes or no. This helps maintain accountability and highlights the connection between consistent execution to the plan and achieving each of your other marketing metrics.

Once you’ve established your marketing scorecard, report on them monthly. Perform deeper analysis on a quarterly basis and make changes to your plan based on what’s working and what’s not to ensure you reach desired results.

Want more?

For help determining the right mix of activities to achieve your desired results, contact us or download the eBook Preparing for Your 12-Month Marketing Plan.