Efficiency is a natural prerequisite for doing business. Otherwise, you run the risk of squandering your company’s precious resources, and your sales and marketing teams’ hard work may go to waste. And on top of all that, you run the risk of continuing methods of attracting customers that simply aren’t working. For a SaaS business in particular, that can be a death sentence. Having the right key performance indicators (KPIs) in place, however, can change everything for the better.

Since you spend countless hours developing and marketing your product, it stands to reason that you would have metrics in place to assess the level at which your business is performing at its best, right? Yet, many companies -- SaaS and otherwise -- fail to put their industry-specific KPIs to work. These values are used to determine the effectiveness and, ultimately, the value in your ongoing business efforts, and they typically vary based on department, as KPIs are targeted to specific objectives.

Because its business model relies heavily on subscriptions and long-term relationships, SaaS metrics accordingly focus on lead development as well as the acquisition and retention of customers. Without these in place to guide your strategy, you’re bound to be left depending on uncertain guesswork to shape the direction your business takes going forward. Scary thought. This could lead to disastrous effects on your current customer base and prevent you from enticing prospective ones to give your product a fair chance.

In this article, we will focus on the KPIs that you should track, as a SaaS company, to measure the performance of your Inbound Marketing Strategy. The main 3 stages of lead generation in an Inbound Strategy are: Awareness, Consideration, and Decision. You should define KPIs for each one of these lead stages to have a full vision about the performance of your strategy.

Keep an Eye on these Metrics for a 360° Vision of your Strategy's Performance

1. Awareness:

2. Consideration:

Bounce rate is a measure of the effectiveness of a website in encouraging visitors to continue with their visit. It is expressed as a percentage and represents the proportion of visits that end on the first page of the website that the visitor sees.

3. Decision:

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is the total cost of sales and marketing efforts that are needed to acquire a customer.

CAC = (total cost of sales and marketing) / (# of customers acquired)

For example, if you spend $36,000 to acquire 1000 customers, your CAC is $36.

CAC = ($36,000 spent) / (1000 customers) = $36 per customer

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