The metric you may not have heard of is click to open rate (CTOR) which essentially measures the effectiveness of the content of your email. It is calculated by the number of unique clicks divided by the number of unique opens.

Using our ongoing example 100 clicks / 180 opens (multiplied by 100 for a percent) = 55%. As with all other email metrics, this can fluctuate based on how awesome your content is. A good CTOR will vary between 20 – 30%.

Chart of the Day: The vast majority of marketers are still using vanity metrics to assess content effectiveness, whilst only half are measuring the effect. Marketing topic(s):Content marketing management. Advice by Robert Allen.

Whether you're a sales leader in SMB or Enterprise, follow our sales metrics cheat sheet to guide your organization to success.

Lead Source Metrics
% Marketing Sourced Leads
% Sales Sourced Leads

Conversion Rate Metrics

Marketing Lead to Customer Rate 
Sales Lead to Customer Rate

Revenue Contribution Metrics
% Revenue From Marketing Sourced Leads
% Revenue From Sales Sourced Leads 
Product/Service Adoption

• Linear attribution: This is the simplest of the multi-touch attribution models. It evenly applies credit to all touchpoints in the buyer’s journey. 
• Time decay attribution: This model assigns more credit to touchpoints closest to the point of sale. Its weakness is that it will never give proper credit to top-of-funnel touches because they will always be furthest from the conversion.
• Position-based attribution: This model focuses on lead generation. It emphasizes two particular touchpoints: the first touch and the lead conversion touch. The rest of the credit is distributed evenly among the remaining touchpoints. 
• W-shaped attribution: This model is a variant of position-based attribution, but prioritizes an additional third touchpoint for when a prospect becomes an opportunity. 
• Z-shaped attribution: Z-shaped attribution takes the w-model further by adding a final touchpoint: customer close. This attribution works best if your organization continues to market to existing sales prospects, and there is close cooperation between our sales and marketing teams.
• Social and content attribution: This social-focused attribution model connects top-of-funnel interactions to bottom-funnel conversions on your website and landing pages. 

Let’s dive into some key B2B lead conversion-tracking methods for win-win clarity.

1. Lifecycle Stages
2. Source & Cost Attribution
3. Goal Ramp Incorporation
4. Monthly Recurring Revenue per SQL
5. Months to Payback
6. Multiple views of the above data

• CLICK-THROUGH-RATES ON EMAIL MARKETING CAMPAIGNS
• CONVERSION RATES
• VALUE OF SITE INTERACTION
• SOCIAL SHARES
• ROI

"Any marketing department will benefit from a common measurement architecture—a decision-making framework used across the organization that matches a set of appropriate metrics (and by extension analytical tools and techniques, such as response modeling, brand tracking, and competitive benchmarking) with the most frequent marketing decisions. The measurement architecture helps sidestep another common pitfall: the tyranny of random facts, a common corporate phenomenon in which different marketing managers each cite a fact or data point revealed by some unique tool or model as ­evidence of the great job they are doing. It’s not that the facts are wrong; they may be totally valid. However, there is no clear way to compare one fact with another or even to know whether they are appropriate reference points for the issue at hand.

In our view, there are three types of marketing decision—strategic, tactical, and ­operational—that are typically made at ­different levels of the organization and ­according to different calendars. (See Exhibit 1.) Strategic decisions tend to involve the significant reallocation of marketing budgets and take place as part of the fiscal budgeting cycle. Tactical decisions typically occur many times throughout the year; they are course corrections for campaign spending levels, mix, timing, and messaging. Operational decisions, such as those concerning particular media or channels, can occur daily—or even hourly in today’s increasingly digital context. In addition, the availability of near-real-time data shifts much of a company’s focus to short-term operational priorities, which can upset the necessary balance between a short- and longer-term view of overall marketing ­strategy and objectives.

A measurement architecture provides marketers with a framework that defeats the tyranny of random facts by laying out which marketing decisions should be made at which time, based on which metrics, and fed by which tools and data. Once such an architecture is established, it becomes relatively straightforward to develop the analytical infrastructure to bring it to life across the entire organization. We find that many of our clients are increasingly able to focus on how to use software platforms to put data, tools, and insights into the hands of marketing decision makers at each level of the measurement architecture across brands and markets around the world."

To measure marketing performance, CMOs and top marketers of high-performing brands use KPIs and metrics that measure Marketing's contribution to sales and the business. Check out the stats here.

Marketers will be more accountable than ever. The mindset shift means moving beyond the KPIs we have been used to and connecting the dots across from strategy to execution to performance. This means starting with the business goals and tracing the path to determine the key variables that lead to those goals. It also means injecting more information to better inform communication strategies:

• Qualified leads: Use behavioral and social data to verify prospect leads and identify false positives.
• Enrich customer profiles: leverage behavioral and profiling information to enhance knowledge about your customers. 
• Machine learning will also enable scoring systems to develop best-fit models that define audience segments, product matches, affinities and customer value.
• Developing an end-to-end accountable framework: Acquisition to retention will require continuous optimizations based on updated market and customer data to improve performance.

Adoption of unified marketing impact analytics (UMIA) is growing as marketers prioritize creating a data-driven approach to marketing investment decisions and realize the importance of maintaining a 360-degree view of customer interactions.
 
UMIA requires buy-in and coordination from all corners of the organization. This report specifically maps out how the internal marketing, customer analytics, technology, and finance organizations, along with third-party partners should divvy up responsibility in tackling marketing measurement.