Metric Funnel Overview

Visualize your customers' journey into quantifiable stages so you can measure the success of your marketing efforts.

An effective marketing organization doesn't just consider its budget when developing a marketing plan; it also considers the expected results of executing that plan. Whether you're measuring how many leads a single campaign generates or you have a corporate-mandated pipeline target, Planful for Marketing's metric funnel can help you visualize your success metrics and apply them to your marketing plan.

Creating a Funnel

In Planful for Marketing, you can create a metric funnel to organize every metric you want to track in your marketing plan, complete with targets, conversion rates, and even profit margins. This feature is available to all account admins, and once a funnel has been created and turned on, the metrics within the funnel can be tracked in every campaign and goal within your plan.

1. To start setting up a funnel, simply navigate to Settings and select Metric Funnel.
   
2. On the Metrics page, you will find a pre-filled sample funnel called Demand Generation.
3. Optionally, you can use this sample funnel to experiment with or start customizing it to suit your budget.  
4. Click the pencil icon to edit.
   
5. In edit mode, you can change the name of the funnel, the names of the metrics, and any of the target or conversion rate values. 

Funnel Views

There are 3 different views of the Metric Funnel: 

• Simple
• ARPO 
• Profit 

Simple Mode

This is the quick view mode, which allows you to see targets and conversions. While everything is editable in this mode, we recommend making edits in ARPO mode for more detailed and accurate adjustments.

ARPO Mode

ARPO Mode introduces the concept of Average Revenue per Outcome (ARPO) for each count metric. We highly recommend starting in this mode, as ARPO is crucial to making your funnel 'smart'. By filling out ARPO, conversion rate, and target on the final row of your funnel, we can make calculations and automatically fill out the rest of your funnel.

When you first add a funnel, we drop you in ARPO mode. If you're adding an empty funnel, you'll see these fields highlighted.

ARPO is a key figure that Planful for Marketing uses to calculate ROI throughout the application. Even if you don't know ARPO, we recommend making a guess (you can always change it!) so that you can see ROI and forecasts elsewhere in Planful for Marketing.

Profit Mode

Profit Mode introduces one more figure, Revenue to Profit conversion. If you know what your Revenue to Profit conversion rate (percent of every dollar made that actually equals profit), you can enter it here and Planful for Marketing can start making some profit projections for your marketing activities.

Funnel Basics

The funnel is intended to be read top-down (like a funnel!) and is divided into Count Metrics on the left and Currency Metrics on the right. You can have any number of metrics in any order you like, but the bottom line cannot be removed. This is because this line is where your ultimate target goes. Is your goal for the year to generate $10 million in revenue? 200,000 deals? This final row is where that goal goes.

Once you fill out your ultimate goal, we recommend you fill out the metric that feeds directly into your goal (if your goal is to generate $10 million in revenue, how much pipeline will that require?) and the conversion rate between the two. Then fill out ARPO (mentioned above), and Planful for Marketing will start calculating other targets for you.

*** Pro tip - we know sometimes these ultimate goals can be sensitive. You can click the eye icon next to the count and currency metric on the bottom line of your funnel, which will 'hide' these metrics, making them unavailable to be mapped in your campaigns and goals.

Activation

You can create any number of funnels and metrics, but in order for the metrics to appear as options to track your campaigns and goals in Planful for Marketing, your funnel must be activated.