Most Important Internal CMO Metrics -- Awareness, Sales, Media ROI -- In That Order

by Joe Mandese , January 30, 2020

Advertising must still play the most important role in most marketing organizations, based on the findings of a first-of-its kind “benchmark” study of marketing organizations, being released today by The CMO Club.

The study, which is based on surveys and interviews with 401 marketing executives, more than half of which were CMO-level, “awareness” remains the No. 1 metric used to evaluate the success of their marketing organization.

More than half (51%) of the executives cited awareness as their most important metric, followed by sales/revenues (32%) and media ROI (29%).

Other customer-oriented metrics such as lead generation, retention, engagement and satisfaction also ranked high in the survey, which asked the marketing execs to pick their “top five” metrics, while Madison Avenue imperatives like “earned media” (6%) and “impressions” (4%) ranked lowest.

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3 comments about "Most Important Internal CMO Metrics -- Awareness, Sales, Media ROI -- In That Order".

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James Smith from J. R. Smith Group, January 30, 2020 at 10:41 a.m.
Interesting, in the sense that "customer satisfaction" ranked so low, in a supposedly customer centric era. Customer retention did rank higher, but the data seems to indicate respondents have basically the same "watch list" they had 15-20 years ago.
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Ed Papazian from Media Dynamics Inc, January 30, 2020 at 11:04 a.m.

Also, if we assume that "program ROI" means almost the same thing as "media ROI", then ROI in aggregate is almost as important as "awareness".

Peter Rosenwald from Consult Partners, January 30, 2020 at 12:29 p.m.

'Awareness' like 'brand value' has many definitions and is a vague measure at best. No doubt ad types chose it because it is sufficiently imprecise to be able to easily manipulate.

Of course, it is important: if there is no awareness there certainly won't be any sales. But far more important I would posit, is the return on the advertising expenditure measured in sales and profits.