By How well would your marketing KPI performance stand up to others in B2B technology? Knowing this answer could be the difference between settling for good enough and reaching your company's full potential.
In this article, we explore B2B marketing benchmarks you need to know to elevate your performance.
Which Marketing KPI Should B2B Technology Companies Care About?
Three of the most important KPIs for technology B2B marketing are:
- Organic Traffic: Over time, you should see a higher percentage of traffic coming in through search. This shows you're producing the right kind of content to reach B2B buyers looking for technology solutions.
- Conversion Rate: The quality of that traffic matters. A higher conversion rate tells you you're reaching the right people with the right message at the right time.
- Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC): It's critical that you look at the whole picture because, in this industry, it costs a lot to acquire one customer but you also sell a high-priced product.
If you don't track anything else, these three will define your success.
Organic Traffic
43% of web traffic comes in through organic search and generates 38% of revenues for businesses. That's huge considering that this is traffic that you don't have to pay-per-click for and will pay much less for in the long term.
According to SimilarWeb, the top 100 websites in the B2B sector get over 3M unique visitors a month. Visitors spend 5 minutes on the site on average and visit 7 pages.
However, nearly 70% of their traffic is direct, which makes sense if we're speaking about top-performing sites. Around 10-15% of traffic is organic, although much of that direct traffic likely comes in through the Google Search bar.
Traffic is split almost evenly between mobile and desktops.
Judging yourself against the top 100 B2B websites including the likes of UPS isn't a benchmark. Your best organic benchmark will be checking the organic traffic of your competitors using a tool like SimilarWeb.
Bounce Rate
The average bounce rate for B2B technology is 63-66%
Traffic sources strongly influence bounce rate. For example, across industries, that variation looks something like this.
- Direct: 66.5%
- Organic: 55.6%
- Social: 67.6%
- Paid Search: 62.6
- Referral: 76.8%
- Email: 61.5%
- All sources: 61%
You may or may not break down your bounce rate to this granular level. But if you do, you'd need to consider this variation when setting standards for each source.
If your bounce rate from one of these sources varies significantly, that could signal a problem with how you're communicating with the audience that source represents.
Conversion Rate
The average conversion rate for your industry is 3-4%, but this can also vary widely depending on the source.
For a Facebook Ad, the average conversion rate for B2B is 10.63% while tech is 2.31%. But keep in mind that it includes consumer tech and business tech. A good benchmark is somewhere in-between.
Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC)
B2B Technology has one of the highest customer acquisition costs in the industry, so it's important to have a robust B2B marketing strategy in place or you end up wasting a lot of money.
The average CAC for B2B technology is between $100-$395.
That's quite a range. To home in on a more solid number for this KPI, you'll want to look at your Lifetime Value LTV to CAC ratio. In B2B technology, this ratio should be around 3 to 1. So you're spending no more than 1/3 of the value of your customers on acquiring customers.
With that said, you shouldn't accept outrageous acquisition costs. Here are some effective ways to lower it.
Other B2B Technology Benchmarks
Let's look at some more industry benchmarks for common B2B marketing channels. How does each of your marketing KPI match up?
- Google Ads
- Click-through rate 2% for search
- CTR 0.46% for display
- Cost per click for search $3
- Cost per click for display $0.50-70
- Conversion rate 2-3%
- Bing Ads
- Click-through rate 2.4-3%
- Cost per click $1-2
- Conversion rate 2-2.5%
- Facebook Ads
- Click-through rate 1.4-2%
- Cost-per-click $1.27-2.52
- Conversion rate for B2B 10.63% while the conversion rate for Tech is 2.31%
- Open rate 18-19%
- Click-through rate 2.8%
- Click to open rate 14-15%
- Unsubscribe rate 0.2%
- Net Promoter Score
- 30
Benchmarks are averages, so individual results can vary, but understanding these marketing KPI benchmarks can be the difference between knowing what you need to fix and believing what you're achieving is already as good as it gets. Chances are you need to increase your organic traffic, improve your conversion rate, and lower your customer acquisition costs.
