📂 Measuring marketing campaigns for B2B SaaS

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Today you'll hear from one of my friends over at Supermetrics.

Fanny Heimonen leads demand generation and is generous enough to share some insights with the Swipe Files audience today.

It’s Fanny from Supermetrics, and we’re excited to take over this newsletter again.

This month, we’re talking about B2B SaaS Marketing Campaigns. More specifically, how to measure and manage successful campaigns in the complex B2B SaaS market.

As a marketing analytics software company, we’re no strangers to marketing data and measuring performance. In this post, we’ll discuss what to track on different funnel steps and what an efficient campaign report looks like.

These findings are based on a podcast episode with JJ Reynolds. You can read more about the topic here, or in case you’d rather listen to the content, you’ll find it in the Marketing Analytics Show.

Designing your marketing campaign plan

Before diving into the specifics of measuring and tracking, let’s take a step back and look at where to start planning for your marketing campaigns.

The first step is to think about strategy. Start by thinking about what you’re expecting and what it is that you're trying to accomplish. Then work your way back from that, and think of the strategy and relevant actions to make that goal possible.

You also want to think of your brand elements, like your visuals, narrative, or content. Brand is one of the most crucial components of SaaS marketing. Branding is tough, but working on it can help build consumer trust, increase clicks on your ads, improve conversion rates, and establish a strong base for your business.

​Learn more about the Supermetrics brand journey from a behind-the-scenes interview with our Head of Brand, Kate.​

While designing your campaign, you should keep in mind your Ideal Customer Profile, as in the people who might want to buy your product. You have to understand your buyers’ needs, not only the companies that might use your products but also the different team members working with your product within a company. These roles might be looking for different benefits out of using your product. It’s your task as a marketer to communicate to these different roles by emphasizing the right features.

What metrics should you track for B2B SaaS marketing campaigns

After the launch, you can’t just let the campaign run without any check-ins. There are many useful metrics that are often divided into three major categories based on the marketing funnel. These are top-of-funnel (ToFu), middle-of-funnel (MoFu), and bottom-of-funnel (BoFu) metrics. At every stage, the relevant metrics depend on the marketing activities your company is doing.

Top-of-funnel metrics

ToFu activities aim to raise awareness for your brand and products. They’re crucial because if you don’t have any marketing activities at the top of the funnel, you might not have anyone entering your marketing funnel, which also influences the rest of the funnel steps.

ToFu activities may include the number of emails you sent if you’re doing cold email outreach, ad impressions if you’re running paid advertising, or the number of podcasts you might be attending to market your SaaS product.

Here’s an example of what your ToFu report might look like with our free Social Media Mix Summary template.
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Middle-of-funnel metrics

The MoFu metrics help you understand how leads shift from the awareness to the consideration stage of the funnel. They also help to quantify the purchase intent of consumers within your funnel.

In the MoFu stage, you often want to drive traffic to your website and track the performance of relevant landing pages. You might follow metrics like the number of visitors, bounce rate, or page views of relevant pages, like pricing, solutions, product detail, or sign-up pages.

Here’s an example of what your MoFu report might look like with our free Google Analytics report template.
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Bottom-of-funnel metrics

BoFu metrics measure the performance at the customer and opportunity stages. They help you recognize revenue impact and guide campaign optimization and improvement decisions.

An example can be the leads generated during a marketing campaign and how many of those leads convert to sales. A high number of leads represent your campaign's excellent performance and the implemented strategy.

Following these funnel metrics gives you a fall-off percentage at every funnel step. You start with a huge number of impressions served, move on to how many people viewed a specific page, and then how many of those became a lead.

This way, if something isn’t working, it’s easier to track where the issue is and take action. For instance, if you know people are viewing your pricing page but not investigating it further, you might want to optimize the page. Whereas if your sales team isn’t closing the leads, you might need to do some sales training.

It’s essential for every marketer like you to know about the relevant B2B SaaS marketing metrics and analyze them appropriately. Without it, you may be unable to measure your performance and make improvements where required.

The B2B SaaS magic metrics, CAC and LTV

There’s no doubt that there are tons of metrics that you should track to evaluate the performance of your SaaS marketing campaign. The number of metrics might overwhelm some, but prioritizing can help.

When it comes to B2B SaaS marketing, two principal metrics take the spotlight. These are CAC and LTV. Let’s look at each in detail.

Customer acquisition cost (CAC)

CAC is the metric that measures the amount your company spends on acquiring new customers. Now measuring cost is a challenge in itself. Each department in your company may consider its related cost as the total customer acquisition cost.

For instance, your advertising department may label ad spend under customer acquisition cost. Alternatively, the finance team may calculate CAC by taking in all the costs incurred by the marketing department.

This confusion may easily affect the overall results of the metrics. But, the issue can be resolved by adequately defining the cost. The definition of the cost may vary in different companies, but it needs to be consistent with yours.

You can measure CAC within minutes with the simple equation below.

CAC = [Total cost of sales + Total cost of marketing] / New customers acquired

Lifetime Value (LTV)

Lifetime value is also one of the most critical metrics for SaaS marketing strategies. It measures the value of a particular customer for a business across the entire relationship.

That said, LTV is one of the most difficult metrics to measure and involves many complications. Here is an example.

Suppose you have a customer who is still a student. They have a free account because of their university email. But as soon as they graduate, they lose access to that account, creating another. Now, if your company tries to sell something to the student, all the efforts to measure a customer’s relationship may go in vain because the student is signing up with a new email address as a new customer.

To overcome this issue, the best way to measure LTV is by setting a date range that’s relevant for your company and where it’s at, and that helps predict LTV in the future.

The formula to measure LTV is as follows:

LTV = ARPA / Net MRR Churn %. In this equation, ARPA stands for average revenue per account, while MRR is the monthly recurring revenue.

How to create a good campaign performance report

The relevant metrics help you manage your marketing campaigns effectively. But with numerous metrics to track, how can you ensure that your final report communicates all the crucial findings to your audience?

The most important thing for a campaign performance report should be its simplicity. Reading and understanding a report with too much data, graphics, and unnecessary stats is impossible. When creating a performance report, you should focus on a structure that flows well and is easily comprehended.

When preparing a performance report, start with answering a primary question that may come to the readers’ minds. For example, B2B SaaS businesses might offer many products in various categories. The primary question, in this case, could be which product category is the most popular among your customers? The response to the primary question should clearly stand out from your report.

Your second question is what your reader may want to ask after viewing the answer to your primary question. For example, what specific products in that category have gained immense popularity throughout the year? The response should give the readers clear action points to take to improve the business performance.

Besides simplicity, you should also pay attention to the style of your report, like how visually appealing it is. Visualization tools, like Google Data Studio, are an excellent way to use charts, bars, or tables rather than words to explain your results and tell a story.

Ultimately, the goal should be to emphasize how your marketing campaign is performing. Make sure to highlight the factors that might have affected the results.

Taking action on your results

The motive of your campaign performance report shouldn’t only be to highlight the findings. It must also contain recommendations and actions to help your future campaigns and improve performance.

One of the biggest mistakes marketers make is tracking metrics without a motive. If you want to take relevant actions on the results, make sure you understand the purpose of the metrics first and then curate strategies to combat any problems you may face while running and managing a campaign. Without an understanding of your metrics, there’s no point in putting in the effort to track them.

Supermetrics helps with your reporting by bringing all your data into one place, like a dashboard, spreadsheet, or data warehouse. When automating your marketing reports, you can focus on the insights and improving your performance.

If you’re interested to see what you can do with Supermetrics, you can start a 14-day free trial here.

That’s it for today.

See you next time,

— Fanny and the Supermetrics team

Thanks again to Fanny. What did you think?

—Corey

p.s. do you want to be able to compare your marketing metrics with other SaaS companies? Fill out the State of SaaS Marketing Survey →​

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