As much as marketing is a game of perceptions, it’s also a game of numbers.

Doesn’t matter how small or big your company is or how deep your marketing coffers are, you should keep an eye on your marketing numbers to get a clear picture of your marketing campaigns—after all, how else would you know which of your marketing campaigns are paying off and which are not?

This is especially true in the SaaS industry, where the competition is fierce and you always need to know your numbers to maximise conversions and improve market share.

That said, not all marketing numbers are going to give you the insights need to optimise your campaigns. You need to focus on a few key marketing metrics to accurately gauge the performance of your campaigns.

Then the question is, what marketing metrics do you need to track? Read on to find out.

Churn rate

Regardless of which niche you are serving in the SaaS space, your ultimate goal will most likely be to get your target audience to sign up for your service. But marketing is not all about just getting leads to sign up for the service, it’s also about keeping the customers you’ve acquired.

That’s where tracking your churn rate can be beneficial. The churn rate can give you an idea of what percentage of users stop using your SaaS solution after a limited period and why.

The average annual churn rate for the SaaS industry is around 5%. Ideally, you want your churn rate to be below the industry average. This will mean that your solution is preferred by your target audience over your competitors.

In addition to tracking the number of users who stop using your solution, you can also measure the churn rate based on revenue and downgrades. But this will depend on your business goals.

Retention

The retention rate is closely related to the churn rate, as it will be the opposite of what your churn rate is. The higher the churn rate, the lower your retention rate will be and vice versa.

While the churn rate provides insights into how many users you lose over a certain period, the retention rate gives you information about the percentage of customers who keep using your solution.

By combining the churn rate and the retention rate, you can easily find out what your customers like and dislike about your solution and take steps to improve retention.

For example, you can improve your retention rate by rewarding your users’ loyalty. It could be done through loyalty programmes or by giving them early access to your brand-new features.

Cost-per-acquisition

This is one of the most common and important marketing metrics you can track. Cost-per-acquisition, or CPA, can be applied to any business regardless of the industry and scale of the business.

CPA numbers can give you valuable insight into the ROI of your marketing efforts. For example, it can tell you how much you’re earning from a customer relative to what you spent to acquire that customer.

It doesn’t matter if you’ve got a million subscribers—if your CPA is high, you’re going to have small margins. So it’s important to keep an eye on your CPA to maximise returns on marketing spending.

Lead/user engagement

Tracking engagement is one of the best ways to gauge the impact of your marketing efforts. This metric can be especially useful when monitoring the performance of social media or email marketing campaigns.

If your lead/customer engagement is low, it usually indicates low brand awareness, which means you need to ramp up your marketing efforts to spread the word about your brand.

High engagement in your social media or email campaigns means that your leads are interested in your service and your customers want to continue with your solution.

You can monitor engagement numbers by tracking the number of email opens, likes on your social posts, retweets, and video views.

Track the right numbers to get the best marketing results

Tracking marketing metrics is a crucial part of optimising your campaigns to improve your performance, as these metrics give insight into the effectiveness of your strategies.

But it’s equally important to track the right numbers, as it’s easy to get sidetracked and overwhelmed by marketing numbers.

So ensure you make use of the latest tools to measure your marketing performance so you get the desired results.

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