Discover how to use key marketing metrics to attract more qualified leads, reduce customer acquisition costs, and grow sustainably.
Marketing is one of the biggest growth levers in your business, but without the right data, it’s easy to invest time and money into channels that don’t deliver. Whether you're running paid campaigns, posting on social media, or relying on word-of-mouth referrals, you need a clear view of what’s working and what isn’t. Marketing metrics give you that clarity.
Consistently tracking performance across your campaigns and platforms empowers you to double down on what drives results, eliminate what’s not contributing to your goals, and make smarter decisions that move your landscaping business forward.
🌱 Join the Free LeanScaper Community to access expert marketing resources, KPI templates, and weekly Growth Accelerator sessions designed to help you scale with confidence.
Why Marketing Metrics Matter for Landscaping Businesses
Most landscaping business owners don’t get into this field because they love spreadsheets. But marketing without data is like landscaping without a plan: messy, reactive, and often wasteful. Whether you’re a solo operator managing your own marketing or running a growing team, tracking the right marketing metrics helps you:
- Pinpoint which channels drive the highest ROI. You might be getting traffic from Instagram, but is it converting into customers? Are those paid Google Ads actually leading to booked jobs? With proper tracking in place, you can stop guessing and start investing in what truly works.
- Understand customer behavior and retention patterns. Knowing how long it takes to turn a lead into a customer, how many of your clients are returning, and what triggers repeat purchases allows you to fine-tune your messaging and customer experience.
- Optimize budgets and reduce wasted ad spend. If you don’t know your cost per lead or your return on ad spend, you might be paying for campaigns that aren’t bringing in real business. Marketing metrics help you reallocate your budget with confidence.
When used effectively, marketing metrics guide your strategy and unlock opportunities to scale more profitably. You’ll know which offers resonate, which audiences to target, and how to turn cold prospects into loyal, long-term clients.
How to Track and Optimize Key Marketing Metrics
The following 10 categories of marketing metrics will help landscaping companies measure what matters most.
Each category provides a different lens into your marketing engine. Together, they form a complete picture of how well your business is attracting, converting, and retaining customers.
In the sections that follow, we’ll break down the most essential marketing metrics for landscaping businesses to track, explain how to calculate them, and show how to apply what you learn to make better decisions. Whether you’re just getting started with marketing or you’re ready to scale a mature operation, these data points will help you grow smarter and faster.
1. Lead Generation Metrics
Before you can convert a customer or close a sale, you need to get in front of the right people. That’s where lead generation metrics come into play. These numbers tell you how many potential customers are finding your business and where they’re coming from. Without tracking this stage, it’s impossible to know which marketing efforts are filling your pipeline.
- Number of leads generated: The raw count of new inquiries your business receives. While more leads seem better, it’s the quality and intent behind them that matter.
- Lead source breakdown: Leads broken down by source, like Google Ads, social media, website SEO, email marketing, and referrals. This helps you focus on the marketing activities that deliver the best results.
- Cost per lead (CPL): Divide your total marketing spend by the number of leads generated during a specific time frame. A lower CPL means you're generating interest efficiently, while a rising CPL might signal a need to revise your ad targeting, messaging, or offer. If you’re investing $1,500 a month on paid ads and generating 60 leads, your CPL is $25. If only a small percentage of those leads convert, that $25 may be too high based on your average job value, and that’s a red flag.
📥 Download the editable KPI tracker
2. Conversion Metrics
Once potential customers are in your pipeline, your ability to turn those leads into paying clients is where the real growth happens. Conversion metrics help you understand how effective your sales process is and where you might be losing people along the way.
- Lead conversion rate: The percentage of your leads that become paying customers. If you’re getting 100 leads a month but only closing five jobs, you have a conversion rate of 5%. A high conversion rate often means your targeting is solid and your sales team is closing strong.
- Sales cycle length: Length of time from the first interaction to a signed contract. Tracking your average sales cycle helps you forecast more accurately, set expectations for your team, and find ways to speed things up, like automating follow-ups or tightening your quoting process.
- Quote-to-contract conversion rate: Measures how many of your issued quotes turn into signed deals. If you’re sending a lot of proposals but not booking much work, your pricing, presentation, or follow-up process may need refinement.
3. Customer Acquisition Metrics
Acquiring new customers is often one of the most expensive parts of running a landscaping business. It’s critical to understand how much you’re paying to win each customer, and how long it takes to make that investment back.
- Customer acquisition cost (CAC): Combine your marketing and sales expenses and divide by the number of new customers acquired in a specific time period. This includes ad spend, marketing software, staff time, and any costs related to closing a deal. The goal is to lower this number over time without sacrificing quality.
- Time to recover CAC: How long it takes to earn back what you spent to acquire a customer. If your average customer only spends $300 on a one-time service and your CAC is $500, you’re losing money. But if that customer signs a long-term maintenance contract worth $5,000 over a year, your CAC is easily justified.
Tracking your acquisition metrics helps you fine-tune your marketing funnel.
4. Revenue Metrics
Revenue metrics show how much money your marketing is actually generating for the business. These numbers help you understand the value of each customer and justify your investment in marketing over time.
- Average Customer Value (ACV): How much revenue, on average, you earn from a customer over a defined period. It’s especially useful for forecasting and determining if your lead generation and customer acquisition efforts are financially sustainable. For example, if your ACV is $2,000 and your CAC is $500, you have healthy margins.
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): Multiply the average revenue per customer by the average time they stay with your company. This number helps you assess how much you should be willing to spend to acquire and retain customers and is especially critical for businesses that offer recurring services or seasonal maintenance programs.📥 Download the Essential Marketing KPIs Tracker to start tracking your revenue performance and uncover opportunities to grow smarter.
5. Digital Marketing Metrics
Your website is often the first impression people have of your landscaping business, and your digital marketing efforts are what drive traffic to it. These metrics help you measure your online visibility and how well your site turns that attention into action.
- Website traffic (by source): Includes organic search, paid ads, referrals, direct visits, and social media. Tracking traffic by source helps you see which marketing channels are pulling their weight and which might need optimization.
- Bounce rate: The percentage of users who visit your site and then leave without clicking on another page. A high bounce rate might mean your landing page isn’t relevant, your site is too slow, or visitors aren’t finding what they expect.
- Click-through rate (CTR): Measures how often people click on your ads or search listings compared to how often they’re shown. For example, if your Google ad is seen 1,000 times and clicked 50 times, your CTR is 5%. Higher CTRs usually mean your messaging is resonating with your audience.
- Cost-per-click (CPC): How much you're paying for each click from Google Ads or social media campaigns. Keeping your CPC low while maintaining lead quality is key to a profitable campaign. High CPCs could mean your targeting is off or your competition is high.
- Search engine rankings: How well your site ranks for the keywords your ideal customers are searching for. Ranking highly for terms like “landscaping company near me” can drive a steady stream of organic traffic without paying for clicks.
- Landing page conversion rate: How many people complete a desired action, like filling out a contact form or requesting a quote. If you're sending traffic to a service page and only 2% are converting, there may be room to improve the copy, offer, or user flow.
Digital marketing metrics help you build a high-performing online presence.
6. Social Media Metrics
When used strategically, social media is a powerful way to build brand awareness, engage your audience, and drive traffic to your website. These metrics give you a clear view of how your content is performing and whether it’s helping to grow your business.
- Engagement rate: How often your followers are interacting with your posts through likes, comments, shares, and saves. A high engagement rate typically signals strong content relevance, which can boost your visibility on platforms like Instagram and Facebook.
- Follower growth rate: How quickly your audience is growing. Steady growth indicates your content is reaching and resonating with new people.
- Referral traffic from social media: How many website visits are coming from platforms like Facebook, Instagram, or Pinterest. This connects your social activity directly to business outcomes, helping you determine which platforms are most effective for driving leads.
- Content shares: A shared post is one of the strongest signals of value and trust. Shares help you expand your reach organically and are often a sign that your content is useful and worth spreading. Monitoring which types of your posts get shared most can help guide your future content strategy.
7. Advertising Metrics
Advertising metrics help you understand exactly how effective your campaigns are at driving revenue, building brand awareness, and capturing leads.
- Return on ad spend (ROAS): How much revenue you earn for every dollar you spend on ads. For example, if you spend $1,000 and earn $4,000 in new business from that campaign, your ROAS is 4:1. A ROAS above 1 is positive, but your goal should be to keep increasing it by refining your targeting, messaging, and offers.
- Impressions and reach: How many times your ad is shown and how many unique people saw it, respectively. If your ad has high impressions but low conversions, it may indicate that your messaging needs improvement or that you're targeting the wrong audience.
- Ad frequency: The average number of times a single person has seen your ad. While repeated exposure can increase brand recall, too much repetition can lead to ad fatigue, causing people to tune out. If your frequency gets too high and results start to dip, it’s time to refresh your visuals or try new targeting options.
8. Customer Retention Metrics
It’s easier and far more cost-effective to retain an existing customer than to acquire a new one. That’s why customer retention metrics are just as important as acquisition stats when it comes to scaling your landscaping business. Repeat customers often spend more, refer friends and family, and become long-term advocates for your brand.
- Repeat business rate: What percentage of your clients return for additional services. A high repeat business rate is a strong sign of client satisfaction and loyalty. If the number is low, it may be a sign that your follow-up strategy needs work or that customers don’t see enough value in your long-term services.
- Referral rate: The percentage of new customers who found you through referrals. The higher the referral rate, the stronger your reputation and word-of-mouth network. It also means you’re reducing your overall marketing costs, since these leads tend to be low-cost and highly qualified.
Net Promoter Score (NPS): How likely your customers are to recommend your services to others, usually based on a quick 1–10 rating. Scores of 9 or 10 are considered promoters, 7–8 are passive, and 6 or below are detractors. The higher your NPS, the stronger your brand loyalty.
📥 Download the Essential Marketing KPIs Tracker to start measuring loyalty, referrals, and repeat business — and turn happy customers into your biggest growth engine.
9. Brand Awareness Metrics
Brand awareness is the foundation of your marketing funnel. These metrics help you measure how visible your business is in the market and how often people are engaging with your brand outside of direct sales activity.
- Brand mentions: How often your business is mentioned online, which helps gauge your reputation and reach. More mentions usually mean more visibility, but it’s also important to monitor sentiment.
- Search volume for brand name: How many people are actively searching for your business name on Google and other search engines. A rising search volume suggests your brand is becoming more recognizable in your community and industry, especially after marketing campaigns or seasonal promotions.
- Share of voice: Compares your online visibility against competitors in your service area. By analyzing search rankings, social mentions, and ad visibility, you can get a clearer picture of where you stand and where you need to grow.
10. Seasonal & Regional Metrics
The type of work you offer, the timing of your marketing, and the platforms you use should all be influenced by when and where your customers need you. Seasonal and regional metrics help you fine-tune your strategy so you're showing up in the right places at the right times with messaging that resonates.
- Seasonal campaign performance: How well your seasonal campaigns perform. This gives you insight into which offers drive the most engagement, what types of content perform best by season, and how to allocate your budget across the calendar year. Use this data to plan early and hit the ground running when demand spikes.
- Geo-targeted traffic: Tracks website visits, ad performance, and conversion rates by geographic area to help you spot local trends and identify your highest-performing markets. If one suburb consistently drives high-value jobs with great close rates, that might be an area to expand service offerings or increase your marketing presence.
Join the Free LeanScaper Community Today
Want to get the most out of your marketing data?
Join the LeanScaper Community and gain access to:
✅ Expert training sessions on marketing strategy
✅ Week 2 of our Growth Accelerator Sprint: Marketing Metrics That Matter
✅ Real-world marketing templates and KPI dashboards
✅ A support network of fellow landscaping professionals sharing insights and support
📥 Download the Essential Marketing KPIs Tracker or get the full Sales & Marketing KPI Bundle.
📞 Book a call with a LeanScaper Guide to build a custom marketing strategy tailored to your business goals and service areas.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
1. What are marketing KPIs, and why do they matter?
Marketing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are measurable data points that show how effective your strategies are at attracting and converting leads. They help you understand where your budget is best spent and what activities are actually driving growth.
2. How often should I review my marketing metrics?
We recommend reviewing KPIs weekly for active campaigns to stay agile and responsive. For broader metrics, like CAC or lifetime value, monthly reviews are usually enough to spot trends and guide strategic decisions.
3. What tools should I use to track marketing metrics?
Use tools like Google Analytics for traffic and behavior data, your CRM for conversion tracking, and LeanScaper’s downloadable KPI dashboards to organize your insights in one place. These tools help you go from data to action quickly and efficiently.
