What are the most important Demand Gen metrics you focus on and what cadence do you review them?

I break out the DG metrics into two groups:

1. Demand generation

Here I focused on generating demand through "push" campaigns to our ICP accounts. I call this "push" because I am essentially shoving our ads in front of folks who never asked for it. I look at things like ad impressions, CTR, engagement rates, and conversions. From an ABM perspective, I look at the same ad metrics, but I also look at account view-through rates (the % of accounts who've seen my ads and then visit our website by other means), intent signal increases, and funnel progression. Holistically, I want to ensure we are driving the right level of engagement to accounts on our target account list. Within our target account list, I want to make sure, period over period, I am creating awareness & demand at the same accounts our outbound teams are working so they have a higher rate of turning emails and calls into conversations. 

2. Demand capture

Here I focus on capturing demand through our "pull" campaigns to audiences that already have existing demand for our solutions. These are paid search, review websites, and content syndication with intent signals. The metrics I look for here are pure lead capture and lead nurture into MQLs that I can hand over to our sales teams to work. 

I review these metrics daily, but only when I see anomalies that last more than 3 days do I actually take action. 

On a weekly, monthly, and quarterly basis, we review the demand gen machine by channel (paid search, paid social, organic, direct, etc.), then break it out by campaign, down to the utm_term level and ultimately follow these down to revenue and LTV:CAC. The intent here is to analyze the numbers to surface insights and propose action items for the month or quarter.

My recommendation is to review your KPIs on a daily basis with a dashboard that is intended to give you a quick snapshot on how programs are trending. You’ll want to do a deep dive on a monthly, quarterly and annual basis. Depending on the program, you may have a different review cadence as well (e.g., bi-weekly).

I prefer to tailor my metrics based on the goal for the tactic or program. What is the desired outcome? How do we measure towards this goal? This will help dictate the metrics for success. Naturally all of our efforts should be tracking towards generating revenue, but depending on the tactic, the metric might be conversion rate, sign-ups, pipeline, etc. This is also highly dependent on the go-to-marketing strategy. Is this a product-led growth (PLG) org or a sales led org? The metrics for different GTM motions will differ.

For example, I work for an org with a PLG motion. Here metrics such as retention, engagement and quality sign-ups matter. This is very different from MQLs and SQLs. If I had to sum this up in one sentence, I would recommend that you think through how each metric ties back to revenue (including down to metrics such as impressions).