The Channel Marketing KPI Metrics You Need to Measure

Tracking KPI metrics is crucial to your channel marketing success. Without the right KPIs, you have no tangible way of knowing whether your partners’ marketing efforts are actually moving the needle. Are valuable dollars being wasted? Would efforts be better spent on different tactics?  

By tracking the right channel marketing KPIs, you can gain the insights you need to better inform your brand-to-local marketing strategy. 

Key performance indicators, or KPIs, are measurable values used to evaluate the success of a campaign, project, or other business undertaking. These metrics help companies identify and assess whether they’ve met their core objectives, then act accordingly, making them central to strategic decision-making.  

Examples of common channel marketing KPIs include: 

• Return on investment (ROI) 
• Conversion rate 
• Website traffic 
• Click-through rate (CTR) 
• Time to market (TTM) 
• Customer acquisition cost (CAC) 
• Cost per click (CPC) 

Setting and tracking KPI metrics offers many advantages to brands and their partners, such as: 

• Improving visibility: KPIs enable you to gain greater visibility into tangible business growth and success. 
• Understanding results: When you measure marketing metrics, you get a better understanding of which tactics are working and which aren’t. 
• Informing decision-making: You can use the insights from KPI measurement to better inform your strategy and make the next best move for your brand-to-local ecosystem. 
• Ensuring worthwhile investment: By evaluating KPIs, you can ensure that your money, time, and effort are going toward the right tactics. 
• Gaining insight into partner performance: By measuring channel partner KPIs, you can get a clear idea of which partners are succeeding and which need additional guidance. 
• Maximizing revenue growth: With all the insights you gain from assessing marketing KPIs, you can better equip your channel programs to drive revenue. 

Not all KPIs are created equal. That’s why it’s vital to set KPIs with the following characteristics in mind. 

KPIs should be: 

First and foremost, you should be setting simple, straightforward KPIs that can’t be misinterpreted. Unclear or convoluted KPIs can confuse partners and team members, leading them to waste valuable time and money working toward meaningless objectives. Ensure your marketing KPIs are clearly defined, with explicit definitions of how to define and measure success. 

Consider the following examples: 

• Unclear KPI: Conversions 
• Clear KPI: Website conversions, including demo requests, newsletter subscriptions, and contact form fills 

The first KPI doesn’t specify the channel being measured or what qualifies as a conversion, which can lead to misalignment and poor results. The second KPI specifies that conversions should take place on the website and the ways customers can convert, offering clearer objectives. 

Your KPIs should align with your brand’s core business goals, ultimately contributing to your progress toward achieving these objectives. Otherwise, they’re not worth pursuing or tracking.  

For example, imagine your brand’s strategic goal is to increase customer retention: 

• Goal-misaligned KPI: Blog views 
• Goal-aligned KPI: Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) 

In this case, aiming to increase the number of views on the company blog wouldn’t impact the overarching goal of retaining customers, making it poorly aligned to the main objective. On the other hand, customer satisfaction directly impacts retention, making boosting CSAT scores an excellent, goal-aligned KPI metric. 

When setting your marketing KPIs, it’s necessary that these metrics are actionable. That means by tracking these metrics, you’ll glean valuable insights you can use to determine your next strategic decision. Without actionable KPIs, you’ll get hollow results that don’t move your strategy forward. 

Say your brand is running a digital ad: 

• Insignificant KPI: Ad impressions 
• Actionable KPI: Click-through rate (CTR) 

How many people came across your ad when scrolling isn’t going to reveal anything ground-breaking about your ad strategy. However, click-through rate shows how well your ad resonated with consumers. For example, if your ad achieved a lower CTR than past campaigns, the actionable takeaway would be that your ad copy or design needs to be revisited to improve its performance.

The KPIs you choose should be quantifiable, objective, and easy to track and assess over time. If you choose KPIs that make measurement difficult, you won’t know whether your efforts were worthwhile.  

Consider the following KPIs: 

• Abstract KPI: Brand reputation 
• Measurable KPI: Google Review star ratings 

While brand reputation is important, it’s not a measurable KPI — it’s a subjective performance indicator you have no standardized way of quantifying. The star ratings your company gets on a review site are much easier to assess and quantify while still giving insight into your audience’s perception of your brand. 

KPIs vary depending on the channels your partners use when promoting your brand. Here are the best marketing KPIs to measure for each.

When determining the performance of content like blogs, reports, and videos, there are many KPIs you can reasonably track to gain useful insights. Some important content marketing KPIs include: 

• Views: Views show how many people organically clicked on your piece of content — a good indicator of SEO value. 
• Average session time: This shows how much time viewers spent on the page on average. This is a good measure of how engaging the piece was and whether it resonated with viewers. 
• Keyword ranking: Search engine marketing platforms can help you determine your content’s keyword rankings, which show how well-optimized it is for visibility in search and answer engines.  
• Backlinks: Backlinks are when a third party links to your content on their website. This is an excellent indicator of online authority.  
• Conversions: This includes any individuals who clicked on a call-to-action (CTA) after interacting with the content. 
• Leads: You can track marketing qualified leads (MQLs) by determining if any of those who interacted with the content have potential to become a customer. 

When launching an email campaign, there are four primary email marketing KPIs you should track: 

• Open rate: This is the percentage of recipients who opened the email. Open rate is a good measure of subject line effectiveness.  
• Click-through rate: Perhaps the most valuable email KPI, CTR shows the number of recipients who clicked on a link or button within the email, showing their interest in the subject matter.  
• Bounce rate: Bounce rate is the number of emails that didn’t successfully reach their intended recipients. Bounces are often indicative of invalid email addresses, temporary server failures, or incorrect domain names. 
• Unsubscribe rate: This refers to the number of recipients who opt out of receiving emails from your company. High unsubscribe rates could be indicative of content that’s unengaging or irrelevant to recipients, or could indicate that emails are being sent too frequently.  

There are many metrics you can assess when launching paid ads. Consider these digital marketing KPIs when measuring your paid media success: 

• Cost per click: CPC is the amount you pay each time someone clicks on your ad. The lower the CPC, the better. 
• Click-through rate: The percentage of people who click on your ad shows how relevant your ad is to your audience and the effectiveness of your messaging.  
• Return on ad spend: ROAS shows how much revenue your ad generates from each dollar spent. A high ROAS indicates excellent ad performance, while a low one shows that your ad isn’t delivering enough value for the cost. 
• Cost per thousand: Also known as cost per mille, CPM is how much your brand pays per every 1,000 impressions. This is a good indicator of how profitable brand awareness is for a specific audience size. 
• Cost per acquisition: This is how much it costs your brand to bring on a new customer through your ad campaign.  
• Marketing-qualified leads: MQLs are the number of high-quality leads your ad campaign generates.  

When posting organically on social media, it’s best to track the following social media KPIs: 

• Impressions: Impressions are the number of people who were exposed to your post. With this KPI, you can gauge whether your posting strategy is algorithmically sound. 
• Engagements: Engagements are the number of reactions, comments, and shares that a post gets. These are great signals for if your social media content is engaging to your audience. 
• Engagement rate: Similar to individual engagements, engagement rate is the percentage at which audiences are interacting with your posts. 
• Follower growth: The rate at which your account’s followers grow shows how relevant and impactful your posts are. 

Though events may seem more difficult to assess due to their in-person nature, there are still numerous measurable KPIs you can track:  

• Registrations: Number of registrations is a crucial event marketing KPI measuring the level of interest in your event. This could also be indicative of the quality of your marketing materials. 
• Attendance: You can track attendance rate by dividing the number of attendees by the number of registrations. 
• Leads: Events are great for generating new leads. Be sure to track new contacts acquired, including marketing-qualified leads and sales-qualified leads, based on how closely they match your ideal customer profile (ICP).  
• Cost per lead: CPL measures how much it costs your brand to acquire leads during your event. 
• Return on investment: The greatest measure of success is ROI, which proves whether or not the amount you spent on the event was worth the results. 

Now that you know what makes an effective KPI metric and the best ones to measure by channel, it’s time to put this knowledge into action.  

With Ansira’s brand-to-local marketing platform, complete with built-in reporting and closed-loop analytics, tracking KPIs across your entire partner network is simple.  

Learn more about how Ansira turns disconnected ecosystems into unified growth.