Today, more than ever, marketers can harness the types of customer data that used to be available only to the most sophisticated consumer marketers. Website traffic & awareness, online marketing programs, traditional lead generation, customer satisfaction, even product usage data are suddenly at the fingertips of many marketers.

Identifying the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) you should track is the best place to start. Otherwise, you’ll bury yourself in a slew of meaningless data. Here are five great places to start:

1. Basic Web Traffic and Conversion

Website visits has turned into the de-facto metric for measuring brand awareness and brand reach. The truth is that more than 50% of marketers don’t look at their own website stats - once you go out of the marketing department, the number is closer to zero. Don’t hide these in Omniture or Google Analytics, bring them into your marketing dashboard and share with the rest of the company. Website conversion is often the first sign of customer engagement. Report on conversion rates, and make sure to keep the conversion metric simple.

2. Lead and Campaign Activity

For B2B marketers, this is the first question everyone asks - how many leads are you adding to the top of the funnel each month. Track your leads and campaigns each month, and visually represent how the total number of new leads, and the breakdown by type, is changing over time. There’s plenty of room for detail once people want to drill into campaigns, but don’t neglect the top-level information.

3. The Marketing Funnel

The marketing funnel is the lifeblood of any B2B marketer. These KPIs often define successful versus unsuccessful marketing efforts. Sometimes the names are different, but the funnel is pretty standard—  Inquiries (raw leads); MQL (marketing qualified leads); SQL (sales qualified leads); Leads Qualified to Opportunity Pipeline. Make sure you report on your marketing funnel on a regular basis - think of it as your KPI for throughput

4. Marketing Contribution to Revenue

Every marketer wants to know what impact their marketing efforts have had on the company’s revenue. The two KPIs that can be tracked here are % of revenue sourced by marketing and % of revenue influenced by marketing. Here you see how those metrics trend over six quarters. These KPIs measure program effectiveness.

5. Product Usage

Customer usage data is rapidly becoming the most critical data source for marketers - especially for companies offering their products or services over the Web. For the first time, marketers can track actual customer usage behavior - without surveys, focus groups, or help desk calls. It’s exactly the data that marketers have been clamoring for, and today it’s more available than ever. It’s easier than you think to start. Find 1-2  KPIs that you can track, and start to ask questions.