A comprehensive list of brand & growth KPIs

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Brand marketing vs. growth marketing

There’s tons written about the differences between brand and growth marketing, and why both are important.

Put simply, brand marketing is how you effectively communicate the heart, soul, and personality of your brand, and growth marketing is how you effectively capture and retain revenue. Neither can succeed without the other.

But these definitions are abstract and apply to every brand differently, and sometimes marketing teams just need to clearly understand how to decide what makes their brand and growth marketing “effective,” beyond just “awareness” or “revenue.”

Here are some KPIs that will help you make sense of performance. Not all of them will be relevant to your brand, and that’s ok — focusing on a small handful of the right KPIs is just as important as identifying the wrong ones.

Brand marketing KPIs

Many brand marketing initiatives are simply less measurable than growth marketing initiatives, particularly in real time — but that doesn’t mean NOT measurable. As tempting as it may be to measure brand on vibes alone, there are a bunch of ways to validate your efforts are paying off, especially when tracking these metrics over time.

Aided and unaided awareness:

• Aided awareness measures the number of consumers that recognize a brand, when prompted with its name or logo (Ex: Which of the following brands have you heard of?)

• Unaided awareness measures how many consumers can recall a brand without prompting (Ex: Which brands do you think of when you need xyz?)

• Running these kinds of awareness studies usually requires a third-party tool

How to use it: Track these metrics over time to understand how awareness is growing as your brand marketing efforts increase in scale, or to assess lift after a particularly big brand push.

Organic search volume:

• The volume of searches your brand terms get, as measured by your search ads accounts and / or your SEO tools

How to use it: Track volume over time to understand things like seasonality, growing brand awareness, and any spikes that can be tied back to your brand marketing efforts.

Increasing quality of new customer acquisition:

• Measured by tracking contribution margins, you can make sure the quality of new customers entering the fold continues to increase over time

How to use it: Tie brand efforts and messaging back to steady margin improvements, and identify which brand efforts are the most valuable and worth continuing to focus on.

Increasing quality of repeat behavior:

• Measured by tracking LTV, you can make sure quality of retained customers increases over time

How to use it: Tie brand efforts and messaging back to steady LTV improvements, and identify which brand efforts are the most valuable and worth continuing to focus on.

Organic social benchmarks:

• Follower growth rate on your accounts

• Content engagement rates (like likes, comments, shares)

• Content performance grouped by theme or bucket

How to use it: Make sense of the less tangible on social and use growth in these metrics over time to validate what’s resonating with your audience.

Social listening:

• The monitoring and analyzing of online conversations and mentions of a brand and its industry to understand sentiment and market penetration

• Running social listening usually requires a third-party tool

How to use it: Capitalize on trends, sentiment, and conversation about your brand and competitors.

NPS score or similar:

• A quantitative metric that scores sentiment about your brand by splitting customers into promoters and detractors

How to use it: Track how customers, both in aggregate and within cohorts, are feeling about your brand over time. You can run all kinds of analyses on this data, like what promoters have in common vs. what detractors have in common, and optimize from there

Growth marketing KPIs

Data and growth marketing initiatives go hand in hand 🤝, so there’s a bias to try to measure EVERYTHING you possibly can. But too much data can be just as confusing as too little data, so focus on the KPIs that are relevant and enlightening for your business. Here are a bunch to choose from:

LTV/CAC:

• The ratio of the lifetime value (LTV) of your customer to the cost of acquiring them (CAC)

• There are differing opinions on what a sustainable LTV/CAC should be, but around 3:1 is a solid benchmark to indicate a healthy balance between growth and profitability

How to use it: Understand the efficiency of your acquisition and retention efforts.

Full funnel conversion rates:

• The conversion rates of each step in your funnel, beyond a conversion from an ad, particularly if your funnel is long or complex

How to use it: Full funnel conversion rates help you understand quality and CAC, beyond something like a landing page or a form conversion. While your growth efforts may not have a huge impact on later-funnel steps, particularly for long funnels, your CAC will still be impacted (it’s a team effort).

Qualified conversions and growth rate:

• The number of good conversions you’re driving

• The rate at which these good conversions increase over time

How to use it: What “qualified” means will be different for every brand, but this is another way of looking at full funnel conversion rates. Simply, growth IS the rate and volume of your qualified conversions increasing.

Activation rate:

• Another way of looking at quality, this is the percentage of your users that activate — typically into a paid tier after something like a free trial

How to use it: Tracking the portion of your users that are willing to pay for your service will help you understand how well you’re delivering on expectations with your marketing.

Landing page CVR:

• The percentage of folks that take a desired action after landing on your landing page

How to use it: Whether or not you’re running a robust landing page testing program, tracking your landing page CVR allows you to understand what messaging and visuals resonate with your users.

Directional CPA:

• The CPA of different ads or campaigns relative to other ads or campaigns

How to use it: While relying on in-platform metrics alone will only ever give you a small piece of the big picture, looking at your CPAs directionally can tell you what ad concepts resonate and drive conversions most efficiently. Then you can double down on your creative testing.

Revenue per session or per user: 

• Backing out total revenue across a total number of sessions in a time period or users in a cohort

How to use it: Typically used to compare the short-term dollar value of different user experiences or user cohorts, but is more limited than a longer-tail revenue metric like LTV.

Retention rates or churn: 

• Retention is the percentage of customers that stick around after an initial conversion

• Alternatively, churn is the inverse — the percentage of customers that don’t make it to an ultimate step after beginning their journey

How to use it: No growth metric gives you a full picture of performance if you don’t take retention into account. Retention rates or churn rates are a good diagnostic to ensure the customers you’re acquiring — especially if you’re paying for them — stick around.

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📣 This week’s shoutouts 📣

This week’s shoutout goes to Noah Stambovsky, Creator of Touchpoints Newsletter!

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