There are dozens and dozens of metrics that a B2B marketer can measure but honestly who wants to see a white paper sized dashboard and on top of that try to make strategic decisions with it. So what I have tried to do here is pick something that all B2B marketers can relate to: the buying funnel and assign some simple metrics which are useful to measure at each stage.

Awareness

• Essentially this is the discovery phase for your potential customers, they have come to a realization that they need a specific product or service but are just testing the waters at this point. It’s also a discovery phase for your business as well because it helps you identify the various touch points users are leveraging to find your site and additionally you can begin to get a sense of the content they are viewing which is enlightening them on products/services in your vertical. This is why I have selected referring sources and content viewed in this initial phase.

Research

• Users now have an idea of what they are looking for and are starting to narrow down the choices by checking out the competitive landscape. B2B Marketers should offer product information, pricing, competitive information to help keep them engaged with your site. I mention downloads and time spent on site in the research phase and want to emphasize that it has to be combination of these two metrics in addition to content viewed which begins to paint the picture of the level and quality of interactions users are having with your website.

Decision

• Site visitors have narrowed down their selection, they are making their final checks on a shortlist of vendors and are ready to make that final leap to become a customer. The number of repeat visits should help indicate if you have made this shortlist and similarly the referring keywords should start giving you a sense of visitors in the decision phase. Keywords which were broad before should start changing to long tail and eventually to branded keywords as visitors begin to grow more accustomed to your site.

Purchase

• Finally, what we’ve all been waiting for – customer acquisition. This doesn’t mean your job is over yet because it’s still very important to understand more about your users purchase so you can learn and apply the knowledge next cycle. Revenue is always good to collect but even more so is ROI segmented down by all your advertising channels. Furthermore it’s useful to get a sense of the length of your sales cycle to help you dictate the timing of your marketing campaigns for users during this entire process.