Marketing KPIs to track weekly — and how to build the scorecard

Marketing has more data than any other department and, often, less clarity. There are dashboards for ads, for email, for the website, for social — and none of them answer the question the leadership team actually asks: is marketing producing enough of the right demand this week?

A marketing scorecard answers that question with a short list of numbers. Not every number you can measure — the eight to ten that tell you whether the engine is working, each with an owner and a target, reviewed every week.

Measure the funnel, not the channels

The most common mistake is a scorecard full of channel metrics: impressions, followers, open rates, click-throughs. They matter to the people running those channels, but they don’t tell leadership whether marketing is working.

Build the scorecard around your funnel instead — the stages a buyer moves through — and add cost and efficiency. Channel metrics stay in the channel tools, where the specialists use them daily.

A simple test for every candidate: if this number went red for three weeks, would we change what we’re doing? If not, leave it off.

Example marketing KPIs, with cadence and direction

“Inverted” means lower is better — Clarion shows it red when it rises above the target.

A few notes on these:

• Pick one “qualified” definition and write it down. MQL means something different in every company. Whatever yours is, put it in the metric’s definition so the number means the same thing every week.
• Budget is an inverted metric. Set the target to the weekly budget and tick inverted — spend goes red when it runs over.
• CAC is monthly. It’s noisy week to week. Track it monthly and look at the trend.
• B2C and e-commerce teams usually swap MQLs and pipeline for orders from marketing, average order value and return on ad spend.

Setting it up in Clarion

Open Metrics for your marketing team and click Add Metric for each one. Fill in:

• Name and Definition — “MQLs: leads scoring 50+ in the CRM, created this week”.
• Target and Unit — dollars, percent, count, or a custom unit such as “leads”.
• Frequency — Weekly for most; Monthly for CAC and list growth.
• Owner — the person who reports this number. Usually spread across the team: the paid lead owns cost per lead, the content lead owns traffic, the marketing ops lead owns MQLs.
• Inverted metric — tick it for cost per lead, spend vs. budget and CAC.

Step-by-step instructions are in create a metric and set targets and inverted metrics. Already tracking these in a spreadsheet? The metrics page has an Import button for a CSV of metrics and past weekly values.

Star the two or three numbers leadership cares most about — usually pipeline sourced and qualified leads — as key metrics. They appear on the dashboard and give the CEO a one-glance answer.

Keeping the numbers current

Typing ten numbers in every Monday gets old fast, and a stale scorecard is worse than none. Most marketing numbers live in tools that can be automated:

• Push — each metric can have a private push URL. A Zapier, Make or n8n workflow, or a Google Sheets script, posts the week’s total to it.
• Pull — if a tool exposes the number at a JSON URL, an admin can have Clarion fetch it on a schedule with pull from a URL.

Clarion doesn’t have native connectors for ad platforms, analytics or CRMs; these generic mechanisms are how the numbers get in. The full walkthrough is in automate marketing metrics.

Reviewing it every week

Run the scorecard as the first step of your weekly marketing sync. Each owner says “on” or “off”. Anything off target gets flagged — on the metrics page, expand the metric and click Flag as challenge, which creates a challenge with the actual and target values filled in, owned by the metric’s owner.

Then, in the challenge discussion, ask the useful question: is this a volume problem (not enough traffic), a conversion problem (traffic isn’t converting) or a quality problem (leads aren’t turning into pipeline)? Each one has a different fix, and reading the funnel metrics side by side usually tells you which.

Common mistakes

• Vanity metrics on the leadership scorecard. Followers and impressions belong in channel reports.
• No pipeline metric. If marketing doesn’t measure what it contributes to revenue, someone else will measure it for them.
• Targets with no basis. Work backwards from the revenue goal: how many deals → how many opportunities → how many qualified leads → how much traffic. Your targets should add up.
• One owner for everything. If the CMO owns all ten numbers, nobody else feels them. Spread ownership.
• Reacting to one bad week. Look for two or three weeks of red before changing strategy — the metric history makes trends obvious.

For scorecard principles that apply to every team, see build a weekly scorecard. For turning campaigns into tracked projects, see plan campaigns as milestones.