In B2B marketing, it is crucial to optimize the demand generation funnel and analyze the right KPIs. Identifying your contacts is of central importance here.
The modern B2B marketer is dependent on data and must carefully select which data to track. The goal must be to achieve sustainable and efficient demand generation and better demand capture. Here you can find out which key performance metrics you should definitely analyze, what information they contain, and what advantages they offer you.
Below, we will look at these key performance metrics in more detail:
Average Conversion Rate
The aim of all demand generation and demand capture in B2B is to inspire high-revenue contacts and turn a prospect into a customer.
To achieve this, you work with a demand generation funnel and ensure that the customer participates in the conversion from stage to stage and is ultimately encouraged to buy.
You use the average conversion rate to measure how well this works throughout the entire funnel.
Advantages of the Average Conversion Rate
Every company builds its own funnel to introduce B2B customers to its products and ultimately to purchase.
The average conversion rate is an important metric for the sales strategy. It tells you how many of your leads actually reach the next stage of the funnel and thus participate in the conversion. Ideally, you want to improve the conversion at each stage.
Things to Watch Out for
In practice, you do not look at the conversion rate in isolation, but in combination with lead generation. Otherwise, the informative value suffers, as a lead can also make several conversions within one stage of the funnel.
Landing Page Performance
You measure the effectiveness of your landing pages as part of content performance. Every piece of content has its own KPI and the landing page is an important part of the content strategy. There are various ways to measure B2B customer actions on the landing page.
Advantages of the Landing Page Performance
On your landing pages, you are interested in how many downloads they contribute to, how many page views they achieve, and how they generally succeed in arousing the interest of your contacts. The corresponding performance metrics can also tell you how often visitors leave their email addresses on a particular landing page.
Another important key performance metrics in connection with the landing page is the bounce rate: How many of your visitors leave the landing page without filling out your form?
A high bounce rate often means that visitors do not feel addressed by the content on your landing page or have not understood it.
Things to Watch Out for
The success of landing pages can be measured using a wide range of key performance metrics. It can be difficult to make the right choice here, as every B2B company is different and has different customers. A little experience is also required here to find out which key figures work best.
Top Conversion Driving Pages
When assessing your strategy for demand generation and demand capture, you work with a large number of pages. The most important of these are the homepage and the landing pages on various topics. Here you are interested in which ones are most successful in generating conversions for you.
Advantages of the Top Conversion Driving Pages
If you look at the top conversion driving pages, for example, you create a ranking with all the pages that are part of your marketing strategy.
At the top is the page with the highest conversion rate or the highest absolute number of conversions.
This allows you to see at a glance which pages you still need to optimize and which landing pages may be superfluous for your campaign.
Things to Watch Out for
It is common practice in B2B to measure the contribution they make to conversions for each landing page and, of course, for the homepage. In principle, you therefore have to look at each page separately and track a separate KPI for each.
This can involve a lot of effort. It is also often difficult to compare landing pages with each other if the content has a different depth of information, for example. Differentiated considerations are required here.
CPC (Cost per Click)
The cost per click gives you another way to assess your leads. You can calculate the CPC using this simple formula:
CPC = (total advertising spend) / (number of measured clicks) x 100
Advantages of the Cost per Click Rate
The CPC tells you how much you have to spend for each individual user who clicks on your ads. How high the costs are depends on the design of the ads and factors such as the keyword popularity or the number of bidders.
The CPC gives you a quick overview of the costs for different campaigns and thus offers important control options.
Things to Watch Out for
For this KPI, it is again true that an isolated view is not very useful. Look at the CPC together with the conversion rates or the click-through rate.
For example, it is interesting to look at the relationship between the expenditure and the conversions subsequently achieved. The CPC alone is therefore not particularly meaningful.
Total New Contacts
For B2B marketers, it is crucial to track the number of new contacts. With this key figure, you are interested in the total number of new contacts that you have been able to acquire via the various channels.
Advantages of the Total New Contacts Rate
For every marketing and sales strategy in B2B, the focus is on whether you succeed in arousing the interest of visitors.
This KPI tells you how many new contacts have been made and allows you to assess the success of your campaigns.
It is crucial that the Total New Contact rate takes all channels into account.
Things to Watch out for
This key figure is useful for assessing the overall effectiveness of the current B2B marketing strategy. However, it does not enable a differentiated analysis by individual channels. For this, you need to record additional key performance metrics.
Conversion Rates
Conversion rates can be defined for each stage of the demand generation funnel. The contact will only move further along the funnel if the conversion is successful. You should therefore always keep an eye on conversion rates.
Advantages of the Conversion Rates
The various conversion rates tell you how well you succeed in guiding the contact through the funnel. Ultimately, the aim is to generate sales from a demand and a need.
For example, you can measure when a lead reaches a certain lead score or when an MQL turns into an SQL.
Which measurement makes sense depends on the design of your funnel and how you define reaching the next stage.
Things to Watch Out for
Conversion rates are already very meaningful in themselves, especially if you look at them over time. However, it is also important to look at the sales you achieve with individual customers.
For your sales strategy, you should also keep in mind that conversion with a solvent and recurring B2B customer is worth more than with a customer who only orders products and services once for a small sum.
Conclusion: Rely on Relevant Key Figures Instead of Your Gut Feeling
There are numerous key performance metrics in demand generation and demand capture. They are most effective when combined to manage your work in B2B marketing.
Every company must select KPIs that best measure the performance of their funnel.
We've given you an overview of the benefits and problems of KPIs to help you make the best choice for your B2B business.
One thing is certain: no marketer should rely on their gut feeling and instead use targeted KPIs to manage their measures and campaigns.
Data-driven decisions are essential in B2B today.
