International marketing can take a lot of trial and error. When breaking into new regions, you’re likely going to find that what works in one place, doesn’t necessarily bring results in another.
Both internal and external marketing metrics provide you with essential, data-driven insights into the effectiveness of your campaigns.
That’s why metrics should be seen as the backbone of decision-making.
When tracked and analyzed correctly, data can truly become your best friend both for company growth and career growth.
Today, we’ll go over how metrics are used to help international marketers, and how to connect it with business revenue.
The content of this blog is based on a masterclass hosted by Adriana Stein, CEO and founder of AS Marketing, and Jennifer Montague, VP of Growth of Onomondo.
Why Are Internal Marketing Metrics So Important?
Regardless of what you’re doing in your marketing campaigns, you need to befriend the data. Yes, it can be overwhelming and scary. Yes, it can seem frustrating and cumbersome. But once you get things down, data can help you scale and break into unknown waters.
First, it’s important to understand the differences between global growth, individual market growth, and the different types of ROIs. Growth isn’t always about revenue, which can seem contradictory, but growth is also about brand awareness, longevity, customer retention and loyalty, and much, much more.
As Jennifer Montague said,
“Data is the great equalizer”
It helps you make your case on why you’re changing your strategy or implementing a certain campaign, no matter if it’s attributable, transformational or a necessity. See a breakdown of the types of ROI below.
With that said, if you’re making an argument to a C-level leader or to the sales team, data will make your case heard.
What International Marketing Metrics Are Important to Track?
Several key metrics should be at the forefront of any marketing strategy. Looking only at global data is too macro as some individual markets are going to outperform others.
Each of these KPIs should be tracked individually for each market in order to better understand how they relate to your campaigns.
Metrics such as sales and revenue data provide direct financial performance indicators, while conversion rates offer insight into the effectiveness of market-specific strategies.
Brand search volume can reveal growing awareness and interest in your brand, and metrics like customer retention and satisfaction rates are indicative of the brand’s health and the value customers derive from your products or services.
While the data may be small at first, everyone has to start somewhere. Plus, the sooner you start tracking data, the sooner you’ll be able to analyze your efforts.
How to Set Up Site Structure for Multilingual Marketing
A site that speaks the local language—literally and culturally—begins with a thoughtful structure. So, setting up your website is going to be the first step in successfully tracking internal and external marketing metrics.
This allows you to separate each market, so you can see how differences work between them all. The following are your three different options.
How to Track Specific Internal Marketing Metrics
Once you have your website structure solidified for each market, you can begin looking at various internal marketing metrics.
SEO KPI Tracking
For SEO, you’ll want to separate global metrics from individual sites. You can see the differences in performance when analyzing a root domain for individual market tracking and a individual market site for market tracking below.
If you check the root domain in France, your data won’t be accurate as French IP addresses automatically are re-directed to fr.wix.com when searching for the root domain.
You can also use Google Search Console for free to see all of your individual clicks based on country for your website.
This can also help you break down costs per region as you get insight into the converting keywords vs. keywords that don’t succeed in a specific market.
Ubersuggest is also a great tool for market keyword tracking when you’re just starting out.
However, SEO isn’t just keyword rankings and traffic. You also have to look at several different market engagement metrics as well as conversions.
Last but not least, page experience also you to understand how an individual navigates your site. You can look at this from a very data driven level, but you can also see it visually using heat mapping from Hotjar.
Email KPI Tracking
Moving on to emails, you’ll want to look at the basics—delivery rate, open rate, and click through rate. Additional things to consider are unsubscribes and subscribes.
Most businesses don’t really see email as a stand-alone channel. But, despite what many people think, it’s still super powerful. New contacts are new potential leads, and you can drive a lot of conversions in this manner.
Plus, email marketing is free.
PPC KPI Tracking
When you’re running Google Ad campaigns, for example, you’ll want to look at keyword performance.
Remember to use localized keywords for each market in order to get a better understanding of your current campaigns. This can give you search volume and search intent, providing you with insight when extending into other markets.
You should also look at audience data to better understand demographics for multilingual PPC campaigns. This kind of data helps you understand what’s worth it to localize.
Then, look at click-through rates, costs, and conversions on average to understand what markets are working and which ones you should pull back on.
Brand KPI Tracking
Some good KPIs to track for brand awareness include brand search volume per market and branded keyword increase over time. This you can easily check in Semrush under Branded Keywords in Domain Overview.
However, don’t forget to analyze the branded clicks and the change in CTR over time in Google Search Console. Even if you are ranking for fewer branded keywords, it could be due to the search landscape. As long as the clicks on branded keywords go up, your brand is on the right track.
Sales & Growth KPIs
Regardless of channel, it’s extremely important that you have a way to attribute growth from that channel. This will help you build the bridge to understand how youractions actions are actually impacting business revenue.
You can set this up using GA4s new event tracking. If you are unsure of how to set it up, check out our masterclass here.
On the B2B side, you also want to look at lead to close rate. This is where the relationship between sales and marketing becomes so important. When working together, you can help create a hire lead-to-close rate, which drives overall company success.
For example, you can divide your sales funnel and closing rate in the following stages:
However, most CRMs do this for you automatically. If not you can create KPI dashboards using Airtable. Then it’ll look something like this:
Connecting International Marketing KPIs to ROI & Revenue
We’ll connect all of the internal and external marketing metrics and what they mean using a few different examples.
The first example is a self-serve B2B company, where businesses purchase a product directly from the website. This tends to be a lower price point kind of business. So, to calculate the return on SEO and email channel efforts, you can use the following data:
Here is another example using PPC in a D2C E-Commerce business:
With an additional 120 number of monthly sales from paid traffic, the company is estimating an additional EUR 154,700 in monthly revenue and a whooping 760% return on investment.
By embedding a metrics-focused approach at the core of your international marketing strategy, you can ensure that your brand not only enters new markets but thrives in them.
Understand that metrics are not just numbers—they’re stories about your customer’s behaviors, preferences, and the resonance of your brand across different cultures.
We encourage you to see the entire masterclass on-demand. There we go over each case above in more detail, and we also do live reviews of some of the participants’ websites.
If you have any questions, reach out to us below.
