As more and more companies move from “old marketing” or “outbound marketing” (tradeshows, print advertising, direct mail, telemarketing) and embrace “modern marketing” or “inbound marketing” (using the Internet to make it easier for customers to find you using your website, SEO, Social Media, Blogs, etc.) a lot of people wonder what metrics they should track to measure their success and progress.

Here are some ideas for the 5 marketing metrics you should track… in my opinion.

1) Website Grade - The great thing about this score is that is it very easy to understand (who doesn’t comprehend a 1 to 100 score?), and it compares you against your peers (currently over 70,000 other websites), and it is based on a number of different metrics so it summarizes data to save time.  Without fail, this metric really allows me to show clients positive development.

2) Website Traffic – This is the total number of unique visitors to your website over a time period, usually a month or a year.  This gives you a sense of the overall interest in your business, and if the marketing programs you are doing are working or not. This is a great metric to watch as you can create tactics quite easily to cause spikes in traffic… such as e-newsletters. We’ve done work with Partymart and sent a series of newsletters leading up to their most popular season, Hallowe’en, which increased their visitation and sales dramatically.

3) Leads - This is the next step in the sales funnel, and is the most important metric for measuring your marketing efforts. Integrating a newsletter sign-up form allows you to keep track of the conversion sign-ups and generates ‘qualified’ leads.

4) New Customers - “How many sales did you close this month?” is probably the most important question you should answer for your business.

5) Customer Acquisition Cost – Many businesses don’t compute this on an ongoing basis, but knowing the total sales and marketing cost for each new customer is important.  It gives you a good sense of how your business is going, and if it is getting easier or harder to grow.

So, that’s a few ideas on metrics I like to look at monthly.