Like most marketing programs, advocate marketing should be measured and optimized over time. As part of this effort, marketing should analyze strategic metrics that show performance against business objectives like advocate revenue contribution. At the same time, marketing needs to pay attention to operational and tactical metrics that highlight things like advocate participation rates.

Strategic advocate marketing metrics

Strategic metrics should correlate to the business objectives identified in the planning process. Examples include:

• Lead generation - Peer referred leads are typically the highest converting. Some estimates put customer referral conversions as high as 10%, whereas typical sales leads convert at a rate of less than 1%. Track the number of leads generated by advocates, what percentage of them convert to new customers, and the average value of advocate-referred deals.
• Revenue influence and attribution - Advocates can be a source of revenue (like a referral lead) and an influence on revenue (such as a reference call, product review or case study). Set up rules for direct attribution (source) and influence in your CRM system to better measure the program's revenue contribution.
• Renewals and upsells - Engaged, happy customers will renew and purchase additional products, so track renewal and upsell rates for advocates.

Tactical advocate marketing metrics

These are the fruits of your advocates' labors. They should be tracked and analyzed against your objectives and compared month over month, quarter over quarter, and year over year.

• References
• Case studies
• Reviews
• Testimonials
• Recommendations
• Social shares

Operational advocate marketing metrics

Operational metrics track the performance of the advocate marketing program itself. You can think of these metrics as fitting into an advocate marketing funnel, measuring the input and output of your program:

• Promotion - Track metrics such as email and landing page conversions. The ultimate metric here, of course, is the number of people who sign up for the advocate program.
• Initial participation rates - Participation metrics include tracking the conversion rate for responses to asks, how participation is distributed across the advocate pool, and which types of rewards convert best.
• Ongoing engagement rates - Some advocates only participate in the program for a limited time, so it's important to track ongoing engagement with metrics like number of responses per advocate, the number of advocates per campaign.

There are dozens of potential metrics to analyze, but the most important thing is to focus on three to five metrics to start. Track these metrics regularly (try to do this weekly) and take action against them.

In fact, you should use these metrics as the basis for a weekly advocate marketing meeting where you can discuss the performance of the program. The most important part of this meeting is to make sure that you're taking action based on the data. You should pay particular attention to which types of advocates are most responsive to your requests and which types of campaigns perform the best.

In as little as a few weeks, you'll have a good understanding of which advocates deliver the most value, which campaigns drive the most engagement, and which business initiatives benefit the most from the advocate marketing program.