How do I measure the effectiveness of my developer marketing campaigns?

To keep it simple, it’s important to have metric-based goals and channels to reach your target audience i.e. developers. The goals of these campaigns could be awareness, trial signups, sales lead, adoption, contribute to your open source project, or a combination of the above, etc. Content has some dependency on the channel, whether it’s social media, email, events, etc. In collaboration with your demand gen/growth marketing team, you can build a matrix of campaign goals vs channels to get a quantitative / ROI view on the programs that are resonating with your audience, tests to be run, and areas that could use additional help.

A great question. I should caveat by saying that if your organization has a seperate DevRel or DevEx team that reports into product isntead of marketing, I don't expect them to share the same methods of measuring community engagement and uplift. For marketing targets, I would look at new feature and product adoption (within first 2 weeks after marketing launch), upsell, retention, and maybe even network effect (mentions elsewhere). Are folks sharing what they've learned from you and writing blogs, Discourse posts, social posts, etc? If they're sharing your tool/features with their network, it's a good sign they believe in it. 

In of the questions above I alluded to having a developer marketing funnel. This is like your classic marketing funnel across top of funnel and middle of funnel but where bottom of the funnel should end up being focused on adoption and advocacy, not sales. 

Which leads us to how you measure effectiveness. Like with any GTM, you need to first begin by what you want to achieve before designing goals and measuring things. By and large these are the metrics broken out by funnel stages.

Top of funnel: 100% you should look at traffic/visits, trials and sign-ups for your product, API keys generated, shares on social, buzz etc

Middle of the funnel: distinct for every business but approximate it to your "hello world" moment or magic moment where the developer has tried enough of your product to want to take that statistically proven "next step". If you're doing events (digital or live), attendance is also good metric for this, especially if they came from a campaign. Product might want to monitor uptick in DAUs/MAUs based on your latest "marketing" push too. 

Bottom of the funnel: Straightforward. It can be # of deployments, # of apps pushed into production, # success stories and of course $ in either pipeline or in booked revenue if the developer is also the purchaser. 

I know you asked about campaigns specifically. This can be a tough one. Ideally it should be good enough that your campaigns help attain/influence any one of the metrics you have above. Not many roads lead to revenue in B2D, but ROI can be measure in other ways: Sign-ups. word-of-mouth/buzz/street cred, media coverage, and last but not least advocacy.

It depends on the GTM motion of the company (marketing-led, sales-led, product-led, ecosystem-led). Let me share some examples for each scenario:

Marketing-led:

• Inbound leads generated from content, performance marketing, events

Sales-led:

• Conversion rate from MQL -> SAL, closed/won (competitive win rate), referrals

Product-led:

• Utilization, tour completion, product sign-ups, WAUs

Ecosystem-led:

• EQLs, partner-sourced/influenced leads (partner referrals)

If you're not sure where to start, test one of these metrics in your existing funnel and see how it goes!

We are tracking the following key metrics for our developer marketing and developer relations programs:

• Engagement: Developer NPS, support CSAT, event attendance to registration ratio

• Reach: Community growth, dev license requests, dev portal site interactions

• Usage: Product usage metrics, app installs, app marketplace site interactions

Ideally, marketing should pay attention to product retention rates, customer lifetime value, feature usage metrics (which can be specific to the feature or product in question), and any leading indicators of possible expansions or churn in the future.