How well are your company’s marketing functions performing? Do you know for sure or are you just guessing?

Marketing is an investment with the potential for high returns—but only if you’re tracking the right numbers. If you don’t know which metrics to track, how can you be sure your marketing strategy is working? It’s like trying to fly cross-country without working gauges. When you know your numbers, you understand which levers to pull to improve performance—and how to explain marketing’s value in ways that resonate with the C-suite.

What Are Marketing Metrics?

Marketing metrics are numbers that represent the performance of a company's marketing activities. Tracking the right metrics allows you to make informed improvements, communicate the success of your team to decision-makers, and justify requested headcount and budget resources. Beyond helping you evaluate the effectiveness of campaigns in generating revenue, marketing metrics are essential for building stronger relationships with sales. They also provide insights into how marketing contributes to broader company goals, ensuring that all efforts support long-term success.

What Makes Marketing Metrics Effective?

To be effective, your marketing metrics must be:

• Actionable. Marketing metrics should tell you something about how to improve your current strategy or inform a future tactic. For example, actionable metrics can tell you which marketing channels are most fruitful.
• Auditable. Marketing metrics must be measurable so you can see any discrepancies between what you expected and achieved. You can identify those reasons and address them. For example, auditable metrics can show you which campaigns are underperforming.
• Predictable. Marketing metrics should be able to show that your marketing efforts will provide a positive return on investment (ROI). Metrics are capable of demonstrating this in advance. For example, predictable metrics help you get the results you want from your team before investing more time and resources.

If your metrics hit these three criteria, you're on the right track!

What Marketing Metrics Should CMOs Track?

The five most important marketing metrics to track are:

1. Customer Lifetime Value (LTV). LTV refers to the value a customer brings to a business from acquisition to when they stop being customers, making it an important metric for understanding marketing’s contribution to the bottom line. The marketing lifecycle typically starts with prospects, who then become leads, and finally customers. This KPI helps you determine the maximum budget you can allocate to acquire new customers. It ensures that the cost per acquisition doesn’t exceed the revenue each customer is expected to generate.

2. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC). CAC is the average cost of acquiring a customer. It's an important KPI because it helps you understand how much money your company spends to acquire new customers.

3. Conversion Rate. Conversion rates are KPIs that show how well your website converts visitors into leads, leads into marketing qualified leads (MQLs), MQLs into sales qualified leads (SQLs), SQLs into forecasted sales opportunities, and sales opportunities into customers. The higher each conversion rate, the more it bodes well for marketing.

4. Churn Rate. Churn rate refers to how many existing customers you lose each month. Customer churn can be due to:

• • Defects in a product or a service offered by the company
  • Unhappy customers who feel that they've been overcharged or cheated out of something
  • Loss of interest in the company's products and services

Churn rate is particularly useful to marketing organizations that dedicate one or more individuals to monitoring satisfaction among existing customers. Such people are particularly helpful to cybersecurity vendors with SaaS-based products that are offered on an annual subscription basis.

5. Marketing Return on Investment (mROI). mROI is the ultimate marketing metric. It describes marketing’s overall return on investment on behalf of the company. If mROI is 75%, for example, then for every $1 spent on marketing, $1.75 in bookings is achieved.

To calculate mROI, you’ll need to know the percentage of bookings (i.e., closed-won sales opportunities) that were initiated through MQLs and, separately, the percentage of bookings that were nurtured by marketing campaigns during sales cycles. (You’ll need to make an assertion for how much credit marketing gets for nurturing leads.)

How Do I Roll Up Marketing Metrics into Marketing KPIs?

Understanding marketing metrics is essential to helping you grow your team and obtain adequate funding. But they're only useful if you can communicate them in a manner that will influence C-level executives.

To make metrics easier to understand, you should break down activities into three types of KPIs:

• • Acquisition KPIs, including lead generation rate (e.g., leads/month), cost per acquired customer, or marketing cost per lead
  • Retention KPIs, including customer retention rate (e.g., percentage of customers retained per time period), churn rate, and LTV
  • Expansion KPIs, including metrics that show that your existing customers are growing with regard to products and/or services used

Summary

Tracking the right marketing metrics is essential to demonstrating impact, optimizing strategy, and aligning with business objectives. Metrics such as customer lifetime value, customer acquisition cost, churn rate, and marketing ROI provide critical insights into performance and growth potential. When these metrics are actionable, auditable, and predictive, they enable more confident decision-making and resource allocation. A disciplined, data-driven approach ensures marketing is not only accountable but also a strategic driver of long-term success.

The CyberEdge Advantage

Ready to level up your marketing metrics? Understanding and clearly communicating the right metrics is key to elevating your marketing strategy—and securing the resources your team deserves. If you’re not sure where to start, we can help. CyberEdge provides Interim CMOs, Interim Digital Marketing Managers, and go-to-marketing planning services to help cybersecurity marketing teams identify and track the metrics and KPIs that matter most. Contact us today for a personalized consultation and discover how to optimize your marketing efforts!