Product marketing is one of the key pillars of a successful Go-to-Market strategy. As a function, product marketing can sit between other departments involved in GTM and connect them. In particular, it can serve as a bridge between your internal and external teams, making product marketing a really important tool in your Go-to-Market arsenal.
But as with any function, you won’t get the most out of product marketing unless you can measure, track and build on it. That’s where product marketing metrics come in. With the right metrics, you can really understand the impact of your product marketing efforts, spot gaps in your strategy and capitalize on the things you already do well.
Today, we’ll be getting to know the most useful metrics for understanding and tracking your product marketing strategy. But first, let’s get to know some of the terminology used around metrics.
Metrics
‘Metrics’ are simply the system you’re using to measure your results. Analyzing these metrics allows you to understand why you’re seeing the results you’re seeing, and be more tactical in your approach to product marketing.
KPIs
KPI stands for ‘key performance indicator’. Based on what you’re already achieving and your goals for the future, you’ll set KPIs internally to help direct your work and understand where you need to focus your efforts. KPIs are measurable and have defined time periods in which they’ll be achieved.
OKRs
OKR stands for ‘objectives and key results’. Where KPIs are something you track within your team, OKRs give you a framework for defining and achieving your goals. So first off you choose your objective, i.e. what you want to achieve, then the key result, which is how you’ll measure your progress in achieving that objective.
By organizing your goals this way, you’ll have a clearer idea of what you need to do to be successful.
How do these fit together? Well, your KPIs and your key results will likely overlap. And you’ll use your chosen metrics to measure both.
Let’s look at some metrics.
(NB: / means divide)
Metrics for product marketing
Win rates
Win rate = Won deals / All deal stage prospects
With this metric, you’re tracking how many deals your sales team has ‘won’, i.e., successful sales. This is important for product marketers because they’re responsible for the journey of the customer before they get to the sales team. Making this journey consistent and ensuring product marketing and sales are working closely together will only improve this win rate.
If a win rate is low, it’s not just a question for the sales team, you need to go back further to product marketing efforts and ask, are we targeting the wrong customers? Have we positioned the product incorrectly?
When you’re measuring win rates, you must decide first how you’re going to define a win and a loss. Will a no decision be included as a loss, for example. If you don’t do this, your results won’t mean anything.
Kate Onley-Gregson
Conversion rates
Conversion rate + Number of conversions / Total number of visitors
Your conversion rate is the percentage of visitors you have to your website who become customers. This is a really important metric to track because if your marketing and content aren’t persuading people to convert, you must identify why, so you can make changes.
On the flip side, if something you’re doing is triggering a lot of conversions, it’s important to know that. If you know what works well, you can keep doing it.
Asset utilization
Asset utilization = (Total assets at the beginning of the period + assets at the end of the period) / 2
Product marketers produce a lot of assets for the Go-to-Market process. If you’ve got a busy workload (which we all do) you don’t want to waste time on assets that aren’t providing value. Understanding how efficiently your assets are used can help guide the assets you produce in the future.
Deal cycle
Average deal cycle = Total number of days it took to close every deal / Total number of deals
This metric refers to the length of time it takes to close a deal. It’s important to have realistic expectations of how long a deal cycle will take because it allows you to plan a more realistic timeline for your Go-to-Market strategy.
Having to push deadlines back all the time and change plans is really frustrating, so it’s important to be realistic and set expectations for your team and the rest of your company. It’ll make your work more efficient and improve morale.
Kate Onley-Gregson
Win/loss ratio
Win/loss ratio = number of won deals / number of lost deals
Win/loss ratio tells you the number of deals you win vs the number of deals you lose. This metric is important because it’s your way of understanding why you’re winning and losing deals.
You can break win/loss down to understand how variables like persona, lead source or industry impact your success.
Site traffic
This is a fairly straightforward metric. You’re just measuring the number of visitors to your website. You can get deeper into this by tracking engagement rate, bounce rate, click rate, and so on.
You can use tools like Google Analytics or SemRush to track this data, plus most social media platforms will have built-in analytics tools. Finding out which of your marketing assets are engaging people the most and best driving them down the sales funnel allows you to keep producing work that resonates with your target audience.
Onboarding and adoption
With a Go-to-Market strategy, the product marketer’s job doesn’t end at the product launch. After the initial purchase, if you want to maximize customer lifetime value or nudge them towards being an advocate of your brand, you need to make sure they’re getting the most out of your product.
That means onboarding customers so they know how to get the best out of their purchase and checking in to ensure they’ve adopted the product into their routine. The ideal result of adoption is when a customer can’t imagine their life without your product.
To keep track of this, you can measure how many customers complete your onboarding process, their engagement rate, how often they use the product and how engaged they are with it.
Churn rate
Churn rate = Churned customers / Total customers
Your churn rate refers to the number of customers that leave your business. If you’re losing a lot of customers, you’re also losing revenue. Acquiring new customers is expensive and a short customer lifetime value doesn’t make for a cost-effective or sustainable business model.
If you track your customer churn you can pinpoint when customers are leaving your business and figure out why. Once you have those insights, you can make changes to improve your churn rate and prolong the lifetime value of your customers.
Grace Gupta
Choosing the right metrics for your product marketing team
Product marketing is a diverse role, and the metrics you choose to track will vary based on the stage your company is at and what your goals are. Are you a start-up? Scale-up? Pre-product market fit? Post-product market fit?
The stage your company is at will determine what you need to focus on, which in turn dictates which metrics are most useful for you to track. When deciding which metrics you’ll track as a team, take into consideration what your goals are and which information would be most useful for you to know.
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