Google reveals its 'secret formula' to how they plan, manage and optimize In August Google launched re:Work, an initiative to share their management tools. Marketing topic(s):Capability and performance review. Advice by Carolanne Mangles.

"Download this bundle and you’ll get:

• Weekly Social Media Report Template to keep your team and organization up-to-date week to week.
• Quarterly Social Media Report Template to present your quarterly progress (when you’ll likely meet with execs, clients, and key stakeholders).
• BONUS: Social Media Posting Schedule Template to plan out your posting frequency (which you can optimize over time as you see what’s working, and what isn’t, over time)."

While multi-touch attribution is the most accurate approach to demonstrating content marketing ROI, there’s a simpler metric that can get you started: leads influenced.

Leads influenced: The number of people who engaged with a piece of content and converted into a lead within the next 90 days.

Let’s look at an example. Say that I publish this post and 5,000 people read it. And amongst those 5,000 people, 65 become a lead for Contently in the next 90 days—they fill out a demo request form, request to talk to a sales person, download an e-book, or some other conversion event. Then, that piece of content would have 65 leads influenced.

This metric is an easy way to show the impact that content has on the top of your funnel and can be tracked with a simple conversion pixel placed on various conversion event points, like the aforementioned demo request form or e-book download. It’s one of the metrics that we bake right into our analytics platform, and helps us optimize our distribution strategy to ensure that content pieces that generate a lot of leads get prioritized in both our paid and organic campaigns.

1. Tableau

2. Cyfe – An all-in-one dashboard to conquer the many moving pieces of your marketing activity.

3. Inspeclet – Make more informed marketing decisions by breaking down user behavior.

4. w3Counter – Emphasizing the importance of real-time data from real-time visitors.

5. Mixpanel – The perfect platform for monitoring mobile marketing.

6. Hotjar – How heatmaps help marketers make crucial decisions.

7. Brand24 – Keeping an eye on buzz for socially-driven brands.

8. GetResponse – Why automated marketing deserves a keen attention to detail.

9. Smart Insights RACE – A practical reporting dashboard that harnesses the power of Google.

10. Google Analytics – The classic standard for analytics still holds its own for modern marketers.

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

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

"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.