Pop Quiz. Which of the following questions pertains most to how you are thinking about measuring your ABM programs?
- Do I have good insight into what ad messaging is resonating across my different audiences?
- Are my ads driving direct and indirect traffic to my website?
- Is Marketing having an influence on the accounts that sales are focused on?
- Are pipeline and revenue metrics tracking to target within different account segments?
- All of the Above
If you answered “yes” to any of the following metrics above, you are on the right track to measuring your account-based marketing (ABM) program successfully because the correct answer is “all of the above”!
We understand that it can be challenging for most organizations to know what metrics to measure, when to measure them, and how you should be measuring them. This is especially true as you make the transition from lead-based measurement to account-based measurement.
In this blog post, we’ll be taking a deep dive into the what, when, and how to measure your ABM programs on a weekly, monthly, and quarterly basis.
Weekly ABM KPIs
Optimizing your ad tactic audiences
As an ABM practitioner, optimizing your ad tactic audiences becomes an important part of your week to week job. By looking at key metrics such as the amount of money you’re spending, the number of impressions you’re getting, and your click-through rate (CTR), you can easily see where you need to adjust your tactics for maximum success.
Within Terminus, you can do this by clicking into the Tactic Detail page for your launched tactics to get a holistic view of performance, as well as drill-down capabilities for each account in the tactic. You can also go to the ad performance table and look at the ads that you’re currently running. If you’re running a generic ad set and seeing a low amount of clicks, it might be time for you to swap those out for a new set of vertical-specific ads and A/B test them against different audiences to help improve CTR.
Additionally, if you’re finding that you are maxing out your ad spend on a regular basis, you can use the table view and sort by accounts with the most spend to see which accounts with high reach are spending the most. Once you have done that, it is recommended that you move those accounts to separate tactics to control your budget more directly and ensure that they are not eating the majority of your spend. This is especially common within tactics that are targeting a broad range of company sizes.
Trending advertisement performance
Everyone wants to know – is my advertising trending in the right direction? Am I making an impact with my ads?
These are important things to keep in mind as you run your account-based advertising strategy. Three key metrics to look at when measuring your advertising performance are your click-through rate (CTR), cost per mille (CPM), and cost per click (CPC).
Within Terminus, go to the campaign overview page to check on how you’re trending on total ad spend for the month by using the spend, remaining budget, and end date columns to check tactic-level ad spend. By looking at these metrics, you can assess how your ad tactics are performing against industry-standard metrics like CTR, CPM, and CPC and understand if you are sitting in the right place on a week-to-week basis.
But that’s not all! To truly understand the value that your ads are driving, you also need insight into how those ads are influencing web visits beyond just a click. This is the power of brand advertising. Maybe a user at one of your target accounts saw an ad but didn’t click. But then, they organically searched for your website in Google or were clicked on a list in your email nurture. You want to make sure your advertising dollars get credit for influencing that web visit or even conversion. You can see view-through visits and view-through conversions within Terminus on each Tactic Details page, or a more holistic view across all your tactics — accessible from the Campaign Overview page.
What accounts need more marketing or sales outreach?
As you develop your account-based program, it’s important that you keep track of the signals that your target accounts are showing — such as intent and engagement. These signals will give you the best idea of where marketing and sales need to be putting their efforts. As you start to see important signals roll in, having a consistent way of notifying both parties of the tasks that need to be completed to best support these accounts will make a significant impact when trying to convert them down the line.
You can do this by reviewing activity and progress within your target account lists. By applying filters like “Needs Marketing and Sales” and “Accounts with No Open Opportunities” to your account lists in Terminus, you can easily highlight where there’s a disconnect between your marketing programs and your sales outreach.
You can also use your global filters for Engagement Spike and Intent to identify target accounts that may be showing in-market signals, and export that list for sales to take action on immediately. Once you have identified which accounts are engaging and showing intent, you should then launch digital advertising to target these accounts, to provide sales with more air cover.
Another way that you can support your sales team is by looking at the Opportunity Insights report to review activity on high priority opportunities forecasted to close this quarter. By identifying opportunities that seem to be stalled, or still in early stages, you can prioritize marketing and sales outreach to those accounts and spin up one-to-one programs.
Opportunity creation and current pipeline
Setting up a weekly meeting with one of your sales leaders is a great way to develop a tighter relationship between marketing and sales. During this meeting, you can review progress on opportunity creation, current pipeline, how you are supporting them, discuss what campaigns and pieces of content are most relevant for the sales reps to promote, and help them understand how the company is performing across different verticals and product lines.
This is also a great opportunity to drill into specific accounts that are on the verge of closing to understand what work needs to be done from both parties to get those deals over the finish line and pop some champagne! This also serves as an opportunity to review and celebrate deals you previously worked on together.
Monthly ABM KPIs
Quarterly ad budget
When doing a monthly review, it is imperative that you look at where you are tracking to your quarterly ad budget. This is a great indicator of where you are tracking to your spend goal for the quarter and will give you a sense of where you need to ramp up your ad spend, ramp down, or adjust specific tactics that are consistently hitting budget (or not).
You can do this by going to the Campaign Overview page in Terminus and filtering by “Quarter to date” and looking at your spend and your overall budget within each tactic.
Account-level ad measurement
Each month, we suggest that you pull data from 3-4 key accounts that had a net new opportunity created. This allows you to gather a more holistic picture of what advertising tactics are helping to convert net new opportunities, how much you need to spend on advertising to create a net new opportunity, and the number of impressions it takes to create an opportunity.
After you have identified your 3-4 accounts, you can drill down and see which advertising tactics those accounts were targeted with, how much spend it took to convert them, and the number of impressions they saw, via the Aggregate Account Report.
You can also use the individual account view in Site Visits to see if there was a correlation between the time ads were served and when they saw web engagement from these accounts to get a more contextual view of the type of content and topics these accounts were consuming and researching when they were being targeted.
Engaged industries
You may have an idea of the industries that your product or offering works the best with but sometimes there are industries or verticals that seem to fall through the cracks. In an effort to minimize missed opportunities, we suggest that you do a monthly analysis of the industries that are engaging the most with your organization. By doing this, you may be able to see industry-based trends that can help you uncover new industries and opportunities that your organization can begin to target.
In Terminus’ ABM Scorecard with Trends feature, you are able to see what industries are engaging with your company, as well as the types of industries that your organization has the best opportunities with.
If you’re currently targeting specific verticals, there should be a correlation between highly engaged accounts and open opportunities within that vertical. But if you’re seeing strong numbers from verticals you aren’t currently targeting, this serves as a good signal that you should start!
Converting Target Accounts
Another great way to measure the success of your account-based programs is by monitoring your target accounts that have converted. This can provide a ton of detailed information about the different accounts, industries, and activities that led to a conversion.
You can do this by going into Terminus Scorecard and filtering by the “Last Full Month” and looking at the total number of Target Accounts and the number of Opportunity Accounts that you have created.
This data becomes even more powerful when you compare target account lists to see where you’re making more (or less) progress. You can even compare opportunity accounts between target lists and a control group to see the impact of your ABM on conversion rates compared to accounts that aren’t receiving the same level of focused attention.
Adjusting your ad budget
As you evaluate your account-based advertising program, it can be extremely beneficial to evaluate how your tactics are performing and understand where you need to be agile with your spending.
Here are two scenarios in which you should adjust your ad budget on a monthly basis:
Scenario 1: Your tactic is hitting the daily budget consistently, but not all accounts are seeing impressions.
Recommendation: Segment your accounts into multiple tactics and increase your budget.
Scenario 2: Your tactic is not hitting its daily budget, but continues to spend more over time with optimizations.
Recommendation: You may not be targeting enough accounts within the tactic to hit your spend limit. This could be a good opportunity to create one-to-one campaigns. Terminus has designated Digital Media Managers assigned to every customer that is prepared to help with this!
Quarterly ABM KPIs
Highest converting content and campaigns
Each quarter, it’s important to understand what campaigns and pieces of content are resonating with your target audiences. This gives your marketing team a good idea of the content that they should continue to create (or drive more traffic to) in the coming quarter to see the most success. Additionally, by communicating this information across your organization, different departments can understand what campaigns and pieces are the most relevant for different audiences and scenarios.
You can do this in Terminus by going into the Attribution by Campaign Type report and looking at your different campaigns — which can be filtered by both first touch and last-touch attribution. This will give you a sense of which campaign types are influencing the most and least amount of pipeline or revenue across your funnel.
If you want to get more granular in your reporting, you can click into your top-performing campaigns for both first and last touch attribution and see the specific activity that has the biggest impact on your business whether it be a webinar, tradeshow, or a specific piece of content.
Building brand engagement in your target accounts
As you drive your account-based execution, it is important to understand if you’re building brand engagement within your target accounts. Brand = Demand, right? Right! By monitoring your brand engagement within your target accounts on a quarterly basis, you’ll be able to report on exactly how many accounts that marketing has impacted over the last quarter and the percentage of your target accounts you have reached.
Similar to how you measured brand engagement monthly, you can also measure your overall target account engagement on a quarterly basis as well. You can also use the ABM Scorecard to take a quick snapshot of your high-level performance for the quarter on how many target accounts you have engaged.
If you would like to go one step deeper, you can segment by industries that had engagement over the past quarter through the ABM Scorecard with Trends feature. This allows you to easily see the industries that are most engaged with your brand and can highlight the companies you do really well with, as well as some of the missed opportunities you can take advantage of in the future. This is especially true when looking at engagement across your open pipeline.
Tracking pipeline and revenue to target
When it comes to showing the impact that Marketing is making on your business through ABM programs, an easy way to do this is by taking quarterly snapshots of your ABM Scorecard. This is important because this view provides a digestible and easy to read overview of how Marketing is moving the needle for either your executive or sales leadership teams.
If you would like to get more granular, you can go into the Marketing Influence Report and look at marketing influence and its correlation to any opened opportunities and pipeline during that month. This is a great view to show your sales team the impact that your marketing organization is making on the pipeline and revenue that sales are working in tandem.
Additionally, if you would like to compare your quarterly performance on pipeline and revenue to previous quarters, you can always filter and see that data to understand benchmarks for your organization. As pipeline and revenue trend up and to the right over time, so should your marketing influenced percentage!
The impact of Marketing
Lastly, showing the impact that your ABM programs are having on your organization is the most important metric of them all.
A great way to show your boss that marketing is making an impact is by using the ABM Scorecard with Trends feature and filtering by your target accounts, win rate, last full quarter, and account engagement. This can demonstrate the power of running an effective ABM program and the difference it makes between engaged vs. unengaged accounts.
You can use this data to show that not only are you doing a great job of engaging target accounts, but accounts that are engaged are converting faster, at a higher rate, and for more money.
Conclusion
Overall, measuring your ABM programs can be difficult to start as you identify the right metrics for your business, but it can also be extremely rewarding and act as a huge motivator for your entire organization with all of the small wins it can highlight when measured correctly.
The last thing to mention is the importance of effective communication across your organization. ABM is not just a marketing thing, it is an everyone thing, so be sure to share your journey and get everyone involved.
