Tracking Your Campaign's Success

You've identified your target accounts, prepared your sales and marketing assets, and are ready to launch your account-based marketing (ABM) campaign. But, how do you know if it’s generating results? Apart from the moment your target accounts convert into paying customers, it can be tricky to judge how well your campaigns are performing.

In this guide, I’m going to show you some of the key ABM metrics you should track to determine the effectiveness of your campaigns. By the end, you’ll know how to measure what matters and use data to inform your campaigns.

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Focusing on Metrics That Matter

Because your campaigns have multiple channels and touchpoints, it can be hard to know where to start. Unlike traditional marketing campaigns, account-based marketing focuses on engaging a small number of leads, treating each one as an individual with specific pain points, and providing unique value to them.

If you’re using ABM, chances are, you have lengthy sales cycles with lots of touchpoints and multiple decision-makers. Research into B2B business leads cycles found that 74.6% of B2B vendors have an average sales cycle of four months. 46.4%, had a sales cycle of at least seven months.

Clearly, it’s going to be hard to track engagement over a sales cycle that long. You can’t attribute a large sale to someone downloading an eBook six months ago (even if it did play a part). Therefore, we’d recommend focusing on bigger picture metrics. While channel-specific metrics are important, there are overall campaign metrics you should be tracking that will give you insights into whether or not your ABM campaigns are working.

Here are some of the most important.

Account-Based Marketing Metrics to Track

1. Influenced Pipeline

First, influenced pipeline. This is one of the key metrics to determining your campaign’s success. It focuses on whether or not accounts in your pipeline were influenced by your ABM efforts at any moment. Influenced pipeline is a relatively straightforward metric to measure because as long as you know your target account was influenced by any channel in your ABM strategy (ads, email outreach, content…), you know the campaign is having a positive effect.

It also avoids your team needing to build complex models to determine which channels had a large or small amount of influence on a lead entering your pipeline. If you can attribute closed deals with your target accounts to your campaign, you know that it’s working.

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2. Return on Investment

Are your ABM campaigns costing more than your returns from your target accounts? Would reducing ad spend prove useful? Do you need to increase your average deal size to make it worth the effort? Your ROI is another ABM metric that’s vital to track. Ultimately, you're tracking the effectiveness of your campaign.

If you have past data from your marketing and sales efforts, you should have benchmarks to go by. When you launch a new campaign you can make a rough estimate into how much you’re going to need to spend, on average, before you close any deals. If your new campaign starts costing more than average without the ROI to back it up, you may need to reconsider your tactics or target accounts.

3. Deal Close Rate

If you can close a high percentage of the accounts you’re engaging with, it’s a good sign. It reflects:

• Your target account selection
• The effectiveness of your ABM campaign

This is an easy metric to measure if you’re running ABM campaigns because you’re likely running a small number of campaigns at once.

To calculate, look at your number of deals won and lost within a certain period and use this formula to calculate your deal close rate:

Win Ratio = Deals Won / (Deals Won + Deals Lost)

Due to the usual length of ABM campaigns, this is a metric that will only be clear after a campaign is finished. But, it enables you to compare different campaigns to see how effective they were.

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4. Content Engagement Rates

How involved are your targets with your content? What content are they looking at? For example, if you created a personalized landing page for an account, you'll want a 60 - 70% page engagement rate. If your targeting and personalization is good, your engagement rates should go up.

To track your content engagement rate, look at the following aspects of your marketing:

Content viewability: A vital metric to track is Content Viewability. This is unique to Internal Results’ content syndication process. Our reporting algorithm shows you how long your target prospects spend reading your content, how long they spend on specific pages/sections, which assets they’re downloading, and more. It’s an effective way to see what content resonates with your audience and indicate which accounts are becoming purchase-ready.

Email marketing metrics: Are your prospects replying to your outreach emails? I’d recommend focusing mainly on positive reply rate. Metrics like open rate and click-through rate are good, but they’re less important.

Advertising engagement rates: Are your target accounts engaging with your paid ads?

Content conversion rates: How are your targets consuming content on your website or blogs? Is your content having the intended effect? Are prospects downloading gated assets?

These will help you understand early on if the type of content you’re creating, and your methods of distribution, are effective.

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5. Pipeline Velocity

How quickly do your target accounts move from MQA (marketing qualified account) to the final stage of your ABM funnel? Understanding your pipeline velocity is imperative for informing data-driven planning. You can measure pipeline velocity in a few ways:

• Total time spent from opportunity creation to close date
• Total time spent in each opportunity stage

Use this formula to calculate your pipeline velocity:

({No. of opportunities * Average deal size * Conversion rate} / Sales cycle length {in days})

For example, a total of 120 opportunities, with an average deal size of $15,000, a 15% conversion rate, and a sales cycle length of 60 days, would mean you're working with a sales velocity of $4,500 in potential revenue per day.

If that’s too low, you know you’ll need to work on strategies to improve your pipeline velocity, such as increasing the number of accounts you’re bringing into the top of your sales funnel, or the type of interactions you’re using to move leads through your sales funnel.

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6. Sales Cycle Length

If you’re targeting big accounts, you’ll have a long sales cycle. But, you still need to track it. Adopting an account-based marketing approach usually correlates to a decrease in sales cycle length because your campaigns are more personalized, more targeted, and more effective.

While it's somewhat of a natural process, tracking your sales cycle length will help you optimize your deal closing process. To calculate average cycle length, look at the total period (in days) for every sale completion (i.e., from the first touchpoint to sale conversion) and divide by the total number of deals.

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7. Average Deal Size

How does each account affect your bottom line? How do they compare to other accounts you’re closing? Average deal size is one of the most important account-based marketing metrics. Running ABM campaigns should correlate with higher average deal sizes, assuming you’re doing things correctly. From the moment you start building your target account list you should only be targeting accounts that closely match your ideal customer profile.

Before you start running your campaigns, you’ll have an idea of the value you can provide for your leads, and therefore, an estimate of your deal sizes.

Use this formula to calculate your average deal size:

Total Customer Contract Value / Total New Customers

If your ABM campaigns are working, you should see higher average deal sizes than you were before you were running them. The companies you target are a perfect fit for your product/service, and you're creating a completely custom sales process for them, boosting trust along the way.

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8. Site Visits from Target Accounts

Are your target accounts visiting your site? Driving content engagement is one thing; getting your target accounts to click through your website or landing page is another. For example, if you sent an email, did the account land on your site, even if they didn’t reply?

If you use sales enablement tools like Drift you’ll have insights into how your accounts are engaging with your site, such as what pages they’re on, and how long they’re spending on individual pages. You can use that information to tailor the next steps in your outreach sequences.

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9. Target Account Coverage

How many people in the account did you engage with? How detailed is your account data? Are you targeting the right people within those accounts?

Targeting the right accounts and the right individuals within an account is a major challenge for ABM marketers. After all, you don’t know if the person you’re targeting is the best person until you start your campaigns. However, tracking your coverage metrics will help you ensure your team is targeting the right people.

To inform your coverage metrics, look at the following areas:

• The number of contacts within each account
• The percentage of those contacts you have connected with
• The number of contacts you have complete data for
• Your contact list's growth within each account

You’ll need to make an effort to have high target account coverage if you want to build buy-in from decision-makers. If not, you’re relying on them being sold to by their own internal team.

Two Frameworks for Measuring Your ABM Campaigns

In ABM, you’ll focus on metrics that move the needle. Engagement levels over traffic volume and lead quality over quantity. However, because B2B sales cycles take long, even with ABM, you should be measuring two types of metrics. These are activity-based, and outcome-based metrics. Let’s take a look at what we mean here.

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Activity-Based Metrics

Activity-based metrics are useful to track because they’re an indicator of future results, and help keep your team motivated. You’ll know if your team is on the right track, even if it’s still early in your campaign and no deals have been closed.

Examples of activity-based metrics include:

• Emails sent per day
• Number of cold calls to accounts
• Number of discovery calls made

They’ll be simple metrics that your team can easily set goals for. For example, send 50 outreach emails per day, or call 10 decision-makers at target accounts. While they don’t necessarily tie into revenue, activity-based metrics are a good way to ensure your team has goals to work towards, even if you’re not expecting to close any sales in a new ABM campaign for several months.

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Outcome-Based Metrics

Outcome-based metrics refer to the business results your campaigns generated. We’ve covered several outcome-based metrics already.

Examples of outcome-based metrics include:

• Average deal size
• Deal close rate
• ROI

If you don’t track outcome-based metrics, you won’t know if your campaigns worked or not. It’s also worth comparing the outcome-based metrics your ABM campaigns generated with the outcomes of non-ABM campaigns. You’ll quickly see if your ABM campaigns generated better results than your regular marketing and sales campaigns.

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Measurement is Key to Success

ABM campaigns can get expensive. If you’re not tracking everything, you’re going to rack up high marketing costs without knowing if they’re having a real benefit on your business. You need a framework for tracking every engagement, reply, and outcome before you launch your campaigns.

If you need help launching your B2B campaigns to generate pipeline, Internal Results can help. Our multi-channel solutions can help you generate leads at every stage of the funnel. Get in touch with us today.