If you’re on the executive team of a SaaS company, tracking your company’s growth is a vital objective. While it’s simple enough to measure a company’s growth by examining its revenue growth, revenue alone doesn’t show the full picture of any company’s overall health. 

If you would like to keep a finger on the pulse of your company’s progress and develop data-driven sales, customer support, and marketing strategies that are perfectly suited to address whatever shortcomings that might be holding back your company’s growth, there are a number of key performance indicators that you need to pay attention to. To help you get started, we’ll take a look at 17 KPIs that all SaaS companies should track.

Key Marketing SaaS KPIs

If you would like to make your marketing efforts more successful, building them around quality data is a great place to start. With that said, here are five SaaS marketing KPIs that are sure to make your marketing campaigns more lucrative.

1. Monthly Unique Visitors

Monthly unique visitors are defined as the number of unique individuals who visit your website during a given month, and it’s a KPI that can tell you a lot about how effectively your marketing campaigns are performing. 

Tracking monthly unique visitors sheds light on how successful you are at leading visitors to your website through both paid marketing efforts such as PPC ads and organic marketing efforts such as search engine optimization. While there’s still a lot of work to be done once a visitor reaches your site, achieving a large number of monthly unique visitors at the very least means that your top-of-funnel marketing strategy is performing as it should.

There’s nothing to gain from shouting into the void, and even a well-polished website with compelling content will not generate many sales if no one ever visits it. This makes growing monthly unique visitors through various marketing tactics an important objective for SaaS companies.

Useful Tools for Tracking Monthly Unique Visitors
  • Google Analytics
  • Adobe Analytics
  • Crazy Egg
  • Leadfeeder
  • Leady

2. Number of Signups

Many SaaS companies offer a free trial or “freemium” version of their product to provide customers with the opportunity to take it for a spin before they make a financial commitment. It’s a successful strategy to employ, given the fact that 25% of SaaS opt-in free trials lead to a conversion, according to data from UserPilot. If your company uses free trials or a freemium version of the product as part of its marketing strategy, the number of customers who sign up for a trial is an important metric to track. 

While tracking monthly unique visitors provides insights about your top-of-funnel marketing efforts, tracking signups tells you more about the effectiveness of your marketing efforts a little further down the funnel. If you are leading plenty of visitors to your website but aren’t generating a lot of free trial signups, you may need to consider ways to make your offer more compelling.

Useful Tools for Tracking Signups
  • Google Analytics
  • Adobe Analytics
  • Clicky
  • Leadfeeder
  • Leady

3. Product Qualified Leads (PQLs)

PQLs are defined as customers who have already used your product and thus have a high likelihood of becoming paying customers. If you offer a free trial or freemium version of your SaaS product, you may wish to treat any customer who signs up as a product-qualified lead. Alternatively, you may wish to wait until they reach specific triggers, such as spending a certain amount of time using the product before you move them into the PQLs category. 

In either case, tracking your PQLs allows you to hone in on the segment of leads most likely to convert. It also provides insights into the success of your bottom-of-funnel marketing efforts.

Useful Tools for Tracking PQLs
  • Google Analytics
  • Calixa

4. Organic vs. Paid Traffic ROI

There are two main categories of visitors who find your website: those who were directed there via a paid marketing campaign such as a PPC ad and those who find your website organically through a search engine. To build an optimized online presence for your SaaS company, it’s important for both your organic and paid marketing efforts to be successful. Knowing the ROI of each can help you identify areas where there is potential room for improvement.

Useful Tools for Tracking Organic/Paid Traffic
  • Google Analytics
  • HubSpot
  • Google Search Console
  • Your preferred ad platform for paid marketing (Google Ads, Bing Ads, etc.)

5. Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA)

ARPA is a measure of how much revenue the average customer account generates for your company on a monthly, quarterly, or yearly basis and thus a measure of how much value a new customer brings to your company during a given period of time. When it comes to gauging the effectiveness of your marketing team, ARPA provides insights into how successful your team is at marketing to your existing base of customers. If you only have one SaaS product for sale, then your ARPA will simply be the price of your single product and isn’t really a metric worth tracking. If you have multiple products or upsells/cross-sells that you attempt to market to your existing customers, though, ARPA is one of the most critical SaaS metrics to pay attention to.

Useful Tools for Tracking Revenue
  • Salesforce
  • Stripe
  • PayPal
  • QuickBooks
  • Any other billing or accounting system your company utilizes

Key SaaS Sales KPIs

There are several key metrics that your sales team can use to gauge their performance and identify areas where there is potential for improvement, including:

6. Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)

MRR is a relatively simple metric to calculate and track and is defined as the total revenue you receive each month from your existing base of customers (or each year if you choose to track annual recurring revenue instead) on a regular basis. If, for example, you have ten customers that pay $1,000 a month for a subscription plan, five customers that spend $2,000 a month, and one customer that pays $10,000 per month, then your MRR would be $30,000. 

In addition to tracking your total MRR, it can also be useful to break your MRR down into various segments such as new MRR added by new customers in a given month, add-on MRR from existing customers purchasing upgrades and add-ons, and churn MRR (the amount of MRR lost in a given month due to cancellations and downgrades).

Useful Tools for Tracking MRR
  • Salesforce
  • Stripe
  • PayPal
  • QuickBooks
  • Any other billing or accounting system your company utilizes

7. Committed Monthly Recurring Revenue (CMRR)

CMRR is a metric that is closely related to MRR. Rather than tracking your monthly recurring revenue alone, however, CMRR also considers new bookings and churn to project future monthly revenue that has not yet come to fruition. 

For tracking CMRR, bookings are defined as any new contract agreement that commits a customer to purchasing a subscription to your SaaS product. Bookings can be an addition to your MRR if they are coming from a new customer or from an existing customer who is upgrading their subscription, or they can subtract from your MRR if they come in the form of an existing customer who has booked a downgrade for their subscription or canceled it altogether. 

Therefore, the formula for calculating CMRR is existing MRR + new customer bookings + new upsell bookings – downgrade bookings – revenue churn.

Useful Tools for Tracking CMRR
  • Salesforce
  • Stripe
  • PayPal
  • QuickBooks
  • Any other billing or accounting system your company utilizes

8. Lead Velocity Rate (LVR)

Lead velocity rate is defined as the growth percentage of your company’s qualified leads over a given period of time and is a measure of your pipeline development. If your lead velocity rate is low or even negative, it means that your sales team is not bringing in enough qualified leads to sustain revenue growth. This makes LVR a highly important metric for a SaaS business to track for evaluating both the performance of its sales force as well as projecting future growth.

Useful Tools for Tracking LVR
  • Google Analytics
  • Adobe Analytics
  • Clicky
  • Leadfeeder
  • Leady

9. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

CAC measures how much it costs, on average, to bring in a new customer to your company. CAC combines the cost of any paid marketing efforts you use to attract new customers as well as the costs associated with the time and resources your sales team spends selling to new customers. 

Since SaaS CAC benchmarks can vary a lot depending on the size of the company and the price of the product it is selling (a company selling a $100,000 enterprise product, for example, would be perfectly happy with a $10,000 CAC while a company selling a $5,000 product would not), it can be a little difficult to compare your CAC to industry averages. 

For more info on the average CAC of SaaS at various stages of growth, check out this informative article.

Useful Tools for Tracking CAC
  • Google Analytics
  • Salesforce
  • SimpleKPI

Key SaaS Customer Support KPIs

Excellent customer service is essential for businesses in all industries but is especially important for SaaS companies selling complex solutions with steep learning curves. If you would like to measure the performance of your customer support and customer success teams, here are eight useful KPIs to track:

10. Number of Tickets Created

The number of tickets that are created for your product is more a measure of your product quality/customer success team performance than it is a measure of your customer support team’s performance. Nevertheless, the total number of tickets created is still a vital customer support KPI to track. 

It can help you gauge customer satisfaction and identify problem areas with your product and/or the information regarding it that you provide to customers, such as tutorials or manuals. Tracking the number of tickets created can also help you select the correct size and focus areas for your customer support and customer success teams.

Useful Tools for Tracking Support Ticket Volume
  • Google Analytics
  • Gorgias
  • Zendesk
  • Zoho Desk

11. Average First Response Time

Average response time is defined as how long it takes on average before a customer support agent provides an initial response to a customer support ticket. According to data from SuperOffice, 46% of customers expect a first response time of less than four hours, so it is essential to keep your average response time as low as possible in order to optimize customer satisfaction.

Useful Tools for Tracking Response Time
  • Zendesk
  • Zoho Desk
  • Gorgias

12. Average Resolution Time

While average response time is how long it takes for agents to provide an initial response to a customer support ticket, average resolution time is a measure of how long it takes your support team to resolve a ticket. Customers tend to be much more patient regarding resolution time than they are first response time, but maintaining a low average resolution time is still a key ingredient for excellent customer support.

Useful Tools for Tracking Resolution Time
  • Zendesk
  • Zoho Desk
  • Gorgias

13. Net Promoter Score (NPS)

NPS is one of the most popular metrics for measuring customer satisfaction and loyalty and is simply a rating of how likely customers are to recommend your company or its product to others. To track NPS, you will need to make use of customer surveys that are sent out to customers who have been using your product for a given period of time.

Useful Tools for NPS
  • SurveyMonkey
  • HubSpot Customer Feedback Software
  • SurveySparrow
  • AskNicely

14. Customer Retention Rate

Customer retention rate is a measure of how many customers remain subscribed to your product and is a metric that can tell you a lot about the satisfaction of your existing customer base. To measure customer retention rate, simply divide the total number of customers who were subscribed at the beginning of the previous month by the number of those customers who remained subscribed at the end of the previous month.

Useful Tools for Tracking Customer Retention
  • Zendesk
  • Gainsight
  • Salesforce

15. Number of Active Users

Number of active users is a straightforward measure of how many customers are actively using your SaaS product. Since there is no standard definition for what defines an active user vs an inactive user, you will need to decide for yourself what constitutes an active user using metrics such as features utilized and frequency of use. Once defined, number of active users is a metric that can help you determine the health of your existing customer base.

Useful Tools for Tracking Active Users
  • Google Analytics
  • Mixpanel
  • StatsMix

16. Churn Rate

Churn rate is the opposite of customer retention rate and is defined as the percentage of customers who leave during a given period of time. To calculate your churn rate, divide the number of subscribers who leave during a set period by the number of subscribers at the start of that period. If your churn rate is higher than you’d like it to be, there may be issues with your product, your customer service/customer success efforts, or both that need to be addressed.

Useful Tools for Tracking Churn Rate
  • Zendesk
  • Gainsight
  • Salesforce

17. Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)

Customer lifetime value is a measure of how much revenue, on average, a single customer brings to your company over the course of their lifetime. In addition to helping you determine a justifiable customer acquisition cost for your company, tracking LTV can also provide insights about the quality of your customer service since great customer support and customer success services are key for optimizing LTV.

Useful Tools for Tracking LTV
  • Google Analytics
  • Salesforce
  • Optimove

Sales Assembly Can Help Your Marketing, Sales, and Customer Service Efforts

One of the most important reasons to track sales, marketing, and customer service KPIs is to identify areas where your SaaS company can improve its processes and strategy. At Sales Assembly, we are dedicated to helping SaaS companies put their data into action through proven training and certification programs for sales, marketing, and customer service. To learn more about how Sales Assembly can help you scale your SaaS company, contact us today.

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For more support in Scaling Better, Scaling Faster, and Scaling Smarter, Sales Assembly can help. Contact us for more information.
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