For all intents and purposes, it’s pretty easy to wrap your head around account-based marketing tactics and why they’re so instrumental in rapid, sustainable growth. But how do you track and measure all of the complex marketing and relationship-building aspects of ABM? And which ABM metrics truly matter?
We fully understand that it’s essential to make sure you’re tracking the right metrics and KPIs to prove ROI—all while evolving and iterating on your ABM campaign progress and the development of future campaigns. In general, it can be pretty easy to get lost in the weeds of which ABM metrics to focus on, so we’ve compiled this handy framework to help you organize your thinking with some actionable recommendations.
We’ve broken the metrics down into two buckets:
Program Health and Program Impact
Program Health
While campaign and pipeline KPIs are incredibly important, your ABM program won’t have a real impact if you don’t bake in ways to show how the campaign is performing over the course of its lifespan. Measuring and reviewing data as you go along also works to quickly uncover weaknesses that you may be able to correct mid-flight.
These KPIs reveal any weak spots in your ABM framework. In other words, they can give you a very clear, data-fueled picture of what’s working and what’s not. Program health metrics are most useful at the campaign and target account level. So it’s important to look at these metrics through the lens of the entire target account as opposed to at the level of the individual lead. In this case, quality trumps quantity.
Simply put, this perspective looks at whether you have complete information and if your program is causing your target accounts to take the desired actions. These KPIs fall under five main categories: coverage, awareness, reach, engagement, and influence.
Coverage
How well do you know and understand your target accounts and the individuals you will be reaching out to? These foundational details have a direct impact on the success of your program.
- Completeness of org chart
- Number of complete contacts within the org chart
- Number of email opt-ins
Watch: How ABM can boost your pipeline by as much as 55%
Awareness
Do your targets know your company and what you sell? For a more relative view, look for an increase of visits/interactions over time, which indicates that a higher percentage of individuals at the target organization are aware of your company.
- Website traffic from target IP addresses
- Number/percentage of individuals who have had interactions with your brand and content
Reach
Is your program reaching your target? In this case, reach measures the effectiveness of your tactics.
- Percent of target accounts that have engaged with your company (or have taken an action)
- Percent of engagements that come from individuals at target accounts
Engagement
Are your tactics causing individuals to take action? Measure total engagement with your company at the aggregate account level.
- Website visits
- Product usage
- Social shares, follows, likes, and comments
- Email open and reply rate
- Content downloads
- Event attendance
- Sales interactions
Influence
Is your ABM program having an impact on Sales outcomes? Look for correlations in your data to connect tactics to KPIs that are important to your company.
- How X (engagement, content, channel etc.) affects:
- Sales cycle
- Contract values
- Lifetime value
Program Impact
Beyond having a complete understanding of each component of your ABM program’s health, you’ll want to track KPIs that quickly and clearly communicate the business impact. This is a topline view that communicates the business impact of your program’s results. These ABM metrics are most useful at the aggregate program level and unlike Program Health, have a natural focus on quantity (or volume.) These KPIs fall under three main categories: marketing revenue, pipeline influence, and campaign engagement.
Marketing Revenue – Measure Contribution
- Marketing influenced and sourced revenue
- First-touch/source campaign ROI
- Last-touch ROI
- Campaign influence
Pipeline Influence – Measure Impact
- Visitors
- Prospects
- MQAs
- SALs
- Won Opps
- Conversion rate between stages
- Velocity: Average transition time between stages
Campaign Engagement – Monitor & Diagnose
- Impressions
- Clicks
- Reach
- Form & landing page conversion
- Paid advertising conversion
Naturally, as your ABM program matures into complexity, reporting on performance becomes more challenging. For the sake of efficiency (and perhaps your sanity), it likely makes sense to invest in an ABM-specific martech platform to unify data and make tracking performance more intuitive and actionable.
If you’d like to learn more about ABM metrics and how to track them, check out our latest guide, Quick Start ABM: How to Build Your Strategy and Drive Revenue. In it, we discuss in detail all the aspects of ABM and outline the steps you need to take to launch a successful program.
