How to Measure and Optimize Your ABM Campaigns

The success of your account-based marketing (ABM) efforts is determined by how often you review the progress and health of your ABM campaigns.   

Lead generation is one of the most prominent B2B marketing goals—after all, it continuously feeds the pipeline. But for quality accounts, you need to regularly measure your B2B marketing campaigns against marketing and sales shared key performance indicators (KPIs), paying close attention to engagement, pipeline, and conversion metrics so you can optimize your approach as efficiently as possible. Establishing a regular cadence to review engagement, pipeline, and conversion metrics throughout the lifecycle of your campaign—not just at the end—ensures higher account engagement and a stronger return on investment (ROI). 

Focus on the Metrics that Matter 

It’s important to measure the metrics that provide clear evidence of your ABM efforts. These metrics are proof that your KPIs are sound and feed into the company’s overall growth goals. Clear metrics and KPIs empower your teams with a unified approach that optimizes every step of the buying journey for tangible business impact. Successful strategies built on smart metrics mean more budget to expand and potentially invest more in your ABM efforts. Hence, it’s vital not to lose sight of the metrics that fuel growth (pipeline and revenue) alongside key ABM measurement metrics, engagement, and performance.  

Your engagement metrics reveal content performance across a variety of data points, such as:  

• Email opens 
• Click-through rates 
• Content downloads 
• Social media interactions 
• Website visit duration 
• Webinar registrations 

Additionally, campaign performance metrics reveal how accounts move through the sales funnel while also unveiling areas of the campaign and overall buyer’s journey to optimize. Pay attention to:  

• Volume: The number of sales opportunities and deals created from each ABM campaign  
• Value: The average revenue value of opportunities in the sales pipeline and closed deals  
• Velocity: The average time it takes to convert your target accounts into customers  

Remember, though, that ABM campaign success isn’t necessarily measured by the quantity of account leads gained. Instead, focus on the quality of accounts converted. For example, one enterprise account that you’re able to grow and retain for years to come is much more valuable than landing several low—or mid-level accounts that won’t benefit from your solution in the long term and will churn to a competitor’s solution. 

Align with Sales on KPIs 

ABM’s success is about delivering a cohesive personalized experience to buyers throughout the entire sales cycle. It’s important for marketing and sales reps to work together to ensure that they’re not only unified on campaign targeting and messaging, but also share a common view of success.   

Marketing teams and sales teams often find themselves at odds when it comes to campaign measurement. Sales leaders tend to focus on the number of new accounts, win rates/deals closed, or contract renewals, while marketing view lead quality and brand awareness as drivers of success. So, where do both teams meet?  

A unified scorecard is your best bet for aligning teams and targeting the right accounts for revenue growth. Instead of pitting marketing against sales, focus on the metrics that matter to determine the most effective path for your shared pipeline and revenue goals. Clear metrics and KPIs empower your teams with a unified approach that optimizes every step of the buying journey for tangible business impact. 

Establish a Continuous ABM Measurement Framework 

Continuous ABM campaign measurement and improvement require a repeatable system or framework to ensure you and your team know what KPIs to track, when to track them, and what actions to take to optimize your approach. Here’s one approach that works through a weekly, monthly, and quarterly time frame:   

Weekly  

Clear and consistent communication within your team is key to successful account engagement. Meet weekly to review key stats that reveal how prospects are engaging with content in the beginning of the buying journey.   

KPIs to Analyze:  

• Content Engagement (i.e., email opens, click-through rates, video views, social shares)  
• Website Visits   
• Lead Delivery  

Content engagement and website visits are important leading indicators of campaign performance. Reviewing these metrics—along with lead delivery stats—each week ensures your top-of-funnel activities are driving key decision-makers through the buyer’s journey. This analysis not only highlights the adjustments needed for your current nurturing strategy but also informs improvements needed for other programs. For instance, if buyers are not engaging with a current piece of content, you should review whether it’s an effective asset at that point in the buyer’s journey or whether it might work better once the prospect moves to a different funnel stage.   

Optimization Tactics:  

• A/B testing for messaging, content formats, and ad creative  
• Compare performance against industry benchmarks  
• Identify bottlenecks in the pipeline and activate campaigns to progress accounts along the sales funnel 

Monthly 

While weekly metrics offer a snapshot of how buyers are interacting with content and messaging, monthly metrics indicate overall campaign health and offer deeper insight into content engagement and brand awareness.   

KPIs to Analyze: 

• Appointments (i.e., demos, booked discovery calls)  
• Cross-channel reach 
• Account engagement (i.e., website visits, live chat interactions, newsletter signups) 

While sales cycle length differs from industry to industry, HubSpot research finds the typical SaaS sales cycle is 84 days. To ensure that your ABM strategy effectively reaches and engages all buying committee members, you and your team should examine the campaign account engagement and cross-channel reach each month. If a buyer isn’t engaging with content, you can review whether you need to refine your persona targeting or replace the content being used. Insight into cross-channel reach also allows you to understand whether your current channel mix is working, or if you need to shift which channels you’re using or increase your retargeting efforts.  

Optimization Tactics: 

• Refine persona targeting for each channel  

• Replace or remove the lowest performing content 
• Dial up retargeting through display and social ads with educational content or case studies for low engaging accounts 

Quarterly 

Quarterly metrics offer a top-down view of overall campaign performance. These results offer the clearest indication of your strategy’s effectiveness throughout the sales cycle and whether any major or minor changes must be made. It’s important to have a holistic view of your entire marketing and sales performance data found in other systems to enrich insights into your ABM strategy. Connecting your CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and MAP data with your ABM measurement platform provides a deeper view of account-level behaviors that allow you to validate campaign and pipeline influence. 

KPIs to Analyze: 

• Closed/won business (deal value) 
• Generated/influenced pipeline (opportunity volume) 
• Time to close (pipeline velocity) 

For example, pipeline velocity—the average time it takes to convert your target accounts into customers—is a strong indicator of campaign health. Measuring the speed at which a lead moves down the sales pipeline tells you a lot about how buyers engage with your content and messaging. A lower pipeline velocity can indicate friction within the funnel, keeping buyers from making a purchase decision. Addressing this issue early on helps to avoid the loss of potential customers. Other KPIs to review quarterly include closed/won business and generated/influenced pipeline to understand the effectiveness of your approach.  

Optimization Tactics: 

• Refine audience segmentation or create small segments to focus on selling specific solutions, verticals, or topics 
• Review intent data for best content and recommended topics 
• Reallocate budgets between channels 

Gain a Better Understanding of the Key Drivers of Your ABM Strategy Performance 

Achieving success is not only about gaining access to the metrics that matter to your business. It’s about empowering your teams with a unified approach that optimizes every step of the buying journey for tangible business impact. While this enriched visibility allows you to quickly identify trends and optimize each channel with content for better performance across your key metrics, you’ll also be able to gain deeper insight and understanding of your entire marketing strategy and what qualifies as higher-quality interactions that benefit your company’s bottom line. 

How Madison Logic Can Help

A holistic view of your entire marketing performance data enriches your insights around your ABM strategy, giving you greater accuracy when tracking and measuring campaign performance.  

ML Measurement from Madison Logic is the only ABM measurement platform that provides a comprehensive view of the four primary media channels in one easy-to-use dashboard. With a rolled-up overview of your entire marketing performance data on a single page, you can easily track and measure your campaigns with greater accuracy and efficiency. This allows you to quickly identify trends, adjust strategies, and make data-driven decisions that will improve the effectiveness of your ABM campaigns. 

Want to gain a better understanding of ABM measurement? Request a demo to learn how Madison Logic can help you get started with a more constant, repeatable campaign measurement and optimization framework.  

And don’t forget to download the 2024 Full-Funnel ABM Playbook to learn the key steps necessary to build a more impactful ABM approach.