How to Measure ABM Success - 5 Essential KPIs

Success, much like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. And in the world of B2B, that means success is in the eyes of your executive team.

So in order to be successful in the eyes of your execs, you’ll have to understand how to measure the success of your ABM program. ABM requires measuring metrics differently through the buyer's journey. To do so, we need a set of KPIs that allows us to track progress from the earliest stages of awareness, all the way down to closed-won revenue. The best ABM practitioners that we’ve had the pleasure of working with, measure their success using these 5 essential ABM KPIs.

1. Reach

Before we dive into marketing reach, I’d like to mention… 👏Your reach 👏 does not matter  👏 unless you’re reaching 👏 the right accounts.👏

The basics of ABM are about quality over quantity - making sure your campaign reaches your target accounts. Would you rather your LinkedIn Ad reach 10k people who aren’t in your target account list? OR would you rather your ad end up in front of 10 decision makers from accounts already showing intent? I think I can guess your answer to that question.

So then, how do you measure reach in an account-based marketing sense? Reach is best defined as the percentage of targeted accounts that are touched by your campaign. Common ways to measure reach include ad impressions or email opens. 

Reach also allows you to answer important questions such as:

• “Do the accounts reached fit our ideal customer profile?”
• “How many of the right accounts were we able to reach?”
• “Have we been able to identify decision-makers?”

Understanding your ABM reach will allow you to better target in the future and improve your campaign effectiveness. ‍

2. Engagement

Are your target accounts engaging with your content and ads? What content and messaging is resonating well? Engagement is the measurement of whether your target accounts are (or aren’t) engaging with your content. Engagements can be measured through website visits, email campaign responses, or ad clicks - but it’s up to you how you want to define interactions. ABM places hyper-personalized content and ads in front of your target accounts. So, if executed well, a successful ABM program should reflect high engagement rates within your targeted accounts.

Ad Engagement

Account-based advertising campaigns present display and social advertising to your key stakeholders as they browse the web. Account-based advertising should Improve your brand awareness and engagement (ad clicks, responses), without wasting ad spend on non-decision makers. 

Email Engagement

Email open, click, and reply rates are great indicators of engaged accounts. 

Website Engagement

Place personalized website pages in front of your target accounts for better engagement rates and time spent on website. Triblio's Smart Pages module allows you to customize and create 1:1 landing pages that are tailored to the needs, interests, and buying profile of each account in an account list of any size. 

Valuable engagement metrics from personalized pages include the number of unique visitors, total page views, total clicks, specific link clicks (via UTM codes),  as well as any known visitors that have visited the site. 

Content Engagement (blogs, ebooks, white papers, etc.)

While engagement is about how your target accounts are interacting with your content, you should be careful when measuring this KPI. For example, we’ve seen engagement tracked as how many gated assets were downloaded. While that is a way to see who is engaging with your content, there are better ways to measure true content engagement - like average time on page, clicks, or website traffic heatmaps. These KPIs are critical to measure if you ungate valuable content for your target account list as part of your ABM strategy. 

Seeing high engagement rates in these different areas? Looking good. See what accounts you’ve successfully engaged, and pass on to sales the insights they need to succeed.

3. MQAs (Marketing Qualified Accounts)

Another B2B acronym (surprise, surprise), but Marketing Qualified Accounts (MQAs) are a KPI you don’t want to overlook when measuring ABM success. MQAs are the number of highly engaged accounts prioritized for sales engagement, meaning the opportunity has a high likelihood of closing. 

A successful ABM program will identify and generate a number of MQAs, that will then be passed on to sales to close the deal. 

So how do you tell if an account is an MQA? ...Well, the answer to that question might be a bit different for everyone. As you develop your ABM program and build out your tech stack, you’ll want to keep in mind marketing platforms and tools that allow you to score and measure engagement across your key account segments. Account scoring is an important piece of ABM, so keep this top of mind when choosing a platform that will integrate into your existing tech stack or that comes ABM ready. 

4. Pipeline

Pipeline is an important metric when measuring the success of your ABM programs. Pipeline is the dollar value of deals opened in target accounts, and is a useful KPI because it enables marketers to measure success by tying the source of an account to a dollar amount of revenue. 

Pipeline is measured through new opportunities created in the pipeline. When measuring pipeline you want to pay attention to what accounts were influenced through your ABM efforts.

5. Return on Investment

Successful ABM programs will demonstrate a high return on investment (ROI). Most marketers say their ROI from ABM is higher than other marketing initiatives because it reduces wasted ad spend. However, compared to traditional forms of ROI measurement, ABM is best measured across multiple channels. Typical single-channel ROI and lead conversion measurement will not attribute credit accurately. Instead of focusing on one channel, ABM looks to a buying group and how they interact across multiple channels. 

Our suggestion - run a cohort analysis for each of your ABM programs. Unlike traditional ROI reporting, cohort analysis is a measurement technique that categorizes your data into groups with common characteristics prior to analysis. A cohort analysis offers a cross-channel view of your ABM programs ROI, and compares the performance of ABM accounts against non-ABM accounts, answering questions like: 

• What difference did our ABM investments make across the business?
• How did ABM influence your inbound demand from target accounts?
• How did ABM influence your sales outbounding?
• Did ABM help your BDRs reach more target accounts on a regular basis?

In our experience, you should focus your cohort analysis on two different areas of your campaign - inbound ROI, and outbound ROI.

Other important metrics to take into consideration when measuring ABM ROI are:

• Sales velocity: Did your sales cycle shorten for accounts in your ABM program?
• Deal size: Did the deal size increase compared to non-ABM accounts?
• Win rate: Did the conversion rate for ABM accounts increase?

ABM Reporting Technology

According to new research conducted by the ABM Leadership Alliance and ITSMA, 76% of marketers saw higher ROI with ABM than any other marketing strategy in 2020. With such a large percentage of revenue being sourced from ABM, keep in mind technology that will help accurately report on your ABM success.

For example, there are a few different ABM reports that Triblio’s platform provides. 

• Funnel Impact Report - Tracks your target accounts progress through the entire funnel.
• Ads Account Lift Report - Provides metrics that track increased target account engagement with your ad campaigns.
• Ads Report - Traditional ad metrics such as impressions, spend, CTR, clicks, and view throughs.
• Account 360 Report - A powerful ABM reporting tool, Triblio’s Account 360 Report gives insight into specific accounts engagements.

Here are a couple of examples of results you can illustrate using ABM reporting:

"Since this ad campaign launches, 580 accounts saw our ads for the first time (newly reached accounts) and 230 accounts visited our website for the first time (newly engaged accounts)."
‍
"Since launching ABM last year, we’ve influenced 38 opportunities within target accounts totaling $11.4 million in pipeline."
‍
"This personalization campaign has driven a 2x increase in the number of MQAs (highly engaged accounts - ready for sales outreach) over the past month."

Depending on how you choose to measure your ABM performance, different platforms offer different reports. When building your martech stack, keep reporting capabilities in mind.

Conclusion

We know from personal experience that ABM success can be a game changer in your marketing and sales strategies. Whether you’re just starting out with ABM, or already running a program, report on these 5 KPIs and see the positive results of ABM for yourself. 

Unsatisfied with your current performance? Check out these sales and marketing metrics to learn from and improve with.

Interested in learning more about Triblio’s reporting capabilities? Chat with one of our ABM experts today.
‍