WhatsApp KPIs: 5 key marketing metrics for tracking success [with benchmarks]

When you send WhatsApp campaigns to customers, how can you track their success? From return on campaign spend (ROCS) to click-through rate (CTR), these are the 5 main WhatsApp marketing KPIs you need to know...

Is your WhatsApp channel performing well? How can you tell? While marketing key performance indicators (KPIs) for email and social media are well known, WhatsApp marketing KPIs are a little less understood.

But as a marketer, you need to track the success of your WhatsApp campaigns.

In this article, we explain everything you need to know about WhatsApp metrics and analytics for marketing teams:

WhatsApp KPIs explained

Why you need WhatsApp chat metrics

The benefits of WhatsApp KPIs

The 5 key KPIs of WhatsApp marketing campaigns [with benchmarks]

4 other WhatsApp marketing KPIs to watch

WhatsApp KPIs vs email KPIs

How to measure the success of brand campaigns

How to track the success of WhatsApp campaigns

Best practices for tracking WhatsApp KPIs

What about CLV and CACs?

To sum up: WhatsApp KPIs are key to your success

WhatsApp KPIs explained

WhatsApp KPIs are ways of measuring the success of a WhatsApp Business channel and your activities within it. Examples are numbers of conversations, conversion rate, generated revenue, ROCS (return on customer spend) and customer lifetime value (CLV).

If you run a WhatsApp channel, you'll need metrics to track the success of service requests, sales efforts and marketing campaigns. In this article, we zoom into WhatsApp KPIs for marketing campaigns.

Why you need WhatsApp chat metrics

WhatsApp metrics and analytics are important because, as a business, you need to prove the value of a WhatsApp channel – as you would for any other channel. The monetary value to the company needs to be bigger than the outgoing costs.

This is especially important in the current economic climate. With mass layoffs in tech and eCommerce and tightening purses, there's more scrutiny than ever on every team's activities.

And marketing budgets are often the first to get hit.

But if you can prove that your actions are earning a profit, you're more likely to continue operating as you always do. 

WhatsApp metrics matter more

In WhatsApp, KPIs and analytics matter even more than other most channels.

Why?

Because you pay per conversation, unlike email which is mostly free to send. A WhatsApp channel has even more pressure on it to earn more revenue than you spend.

Also, although we know the benefits of WhatsApp very well ? some people still aren't aware of how amazing it is as a revenue and brand channel. Even though companies in Europe have been using our software for over 2 years now, there's still a perception that it's a new, untested territory.

This is far from the truth, but the more concrete proof you can produce for the doubters, the better.

...unless you're in it for the brand

Profit and WhatsApp metrics are less important if you decide to run your channel as a pure "customer service" or "brand" channel.

In this case, the value to your business could be customer retention or intangible brand benefits.

For example:

Feedback to improve products: our client, Venezianico, uses WhatsApp to gather customer feedback and suggestions to help them design the next product – which also helps it sell more when it's released (see Venezianico's story)

Social proof to boost sales: our client, Oatsome, used WhatsApp to gather reviews before a product launch so it could have solid social proof for the public launch (see Oatsome's story)

The benefits of WhatsApp metrics

With good, consistently measured WhatsApp analytics, you can:

Prove you're continuing to make a profit 

Compare different campaigns and see which ones are successful 

Improve future campaigns based on results

Show the value of WhatsApp to leadership

Observe trends in WhatsApp behavior