Inbound marketing campaigns are continually enhanced through the measurements and insights that are obtained. But, with so much to measure, where should you start?
Goals should be set based on marketing challenges and business goals, and measuring their performance. Look at these 13 key metrics that matter when evaluating and reporting on the effectiveness of an inbound marketing campaign.
Traffic Metrics
1. Traffic to lead conversion rate
Increasing traffic to your site is vital to measure. However, even if you are generating traffic, are your inbound marketing efforts bringing the right people to your website? To evaluate this, look at your traffic to lead conversion rate.
Most sites convert at between 1-3%. You should set your traffic to lead conversation goal based on your current conversion rate and aim to improve this. Your goal could look like this:
Increase traffic to lead conversion rate from 0.6% to 1.1% by the end of the first four months of the campaign
2. Lead to customer conversion rate
In the same way that you set goals for traffic, you will also measure and set goals for leads and customers. The HubSpot median for conversion rate from contact (lead) to customer is 7.1%.
Examples of goals could be:
Increase lead to customer conversion rate from 6% to 7% by the end of the first four months of the campaign.
3. Lead attribution
When you have enough data to generate statistically significant results, start analysing and reporting on lead attribution. This indicates the online activity that your leads participate in which are most likely to see them to converting to customers. The insights obtained from spending time looking at lead attribution will assist you in a number of ways:
- Allows you to optimise those particular parts of your campaign to further assist conversion – for example, if leads are downloading a specific piece of content before converting to customers, optimise that content and include it in a sales lead nurturing campaign
- Data from the lead attribution insights can assist you in developing a lead scoring tool
4. Cost per lead and cost per acquisition
While it’s important to always look at ROI, it is imperative that you measure the cost per lead. Our metrics report is a great resource to keep on hand for all the formulas you’ll use to measure. Cost per lead is essential to measuring the success of your marketing efforts in generating leads. Cost per acquisition allows you to get an understanding of the total costs of gaining a customer, and contributes towards determining the success of your business as well as assisting in making decisions such as resource spend and budget allocation.
5. Submission rate of landing pages
Landing pages should be generating submission rates of between 20-30%. If you are not getting these submission rates then it is time to look at making some changes to the landing page. These changes could include looking at the copy, the visuals, the call-to-action, the colour and design. The landing page should always indicate to the lead what they will be getting through submitting the form and why this is helpful and relevant to them.
An inbound marketing campaign should have a number of landing pages continually being monitored and optimised.
6. Lead and customer source
Reporting on where your visitors, leads and customers are coming from is essential in aligning your strategy. For example, if a majority of your leads are coming from social but they are not converting to customers, you need to optimise your lead nurturing and/or social strategy.
7. Marketing and sales funnel size
Knowing how many leads you have and where they come from isn’t enough; you also need to know if they are moving through the funnel. If you find that contacts are not moving through the funnel, you need to see where the blockage is happening. If contacts are getting stuck at the marketing qualified leads stage, for example, consider putting together a lead nurturing campaign to move them down the funnel.
A good funnel looks something like this:
Website Metrics
8. Time spent on the website
What is most important about time spent on site is that Google uses this as a metric when ranking your site – it’s an indication as to whether the content is engaging and valuable to your readers. Not only should you look at the time on the site, but you should also look at their behaviour on the site. Angela Harless from AcrobatAnt shares “We feel people are seeing value and finding what they're looking for if they spending time reading our content and going to multiple pages.”
9. Bounce rate
A high bounce rate indicates that people are coming to your site and immediately leaving. If your bounce rate is high you need to ask yourself these questions:
- Are my call-to-actions attracting the right people to the site?
- Do I need to look at the design of my site?
- Why does my site not capture people’s attention and keep it?
A goal to set for your bounce rate would look something like this:
Decrease bounce rate by 25% in 3 months
Blog Metrics
10. Subscribers and views
It is important to monitor the performance of your blogs on a daily basis.
- Are they attracting visitors?
- Are people completing the required action after reading the blog?
- Are your call-to-actions on the blog relevant?
- What are the social shares on each blog?
- What is the main driver of traffic to your blog?
- Do you have inbound links? Is your blog optimised for SEO?
- Should you update your blog content?
Monitor your blog subscription list. You want this to be continually growing. Ensure that you make it as simple as possible to subscribe to your blog. Downloading separate programmes or having too many items on a form can be a barrier to increasing your blog subscription list. Simply put, if a leads wants to subscribe, it shouldn’t take them more than 30 seconds to do so.
11. Keyword ranking
Which keywords is your site ranking for? Which of these keywords do you want to be ranking for? Ensure that your content is optimised for these keywords – your content is the key to ranking high on search engine results.
Email Metrics
12. Open and click through rate (CTR)
Email is not dead. When you‘re sending emails, monitor your email open rate and clickthrough rate against available benchmarks. If your mails are not being opened, perhaps you should relook at the header or subject line. If they are not clicking through after reading your email, look at the content in the email.
Social Metrics
13. As an inbound marketer you should be asking yourself these questions – and making decisions based on the answers - about your social media:
- Which social platform is generating leads?
- Are social visitors converting to leads?
- Are the leads which are coming from social converting to customers?
- Is my social following increasing?
- Is my social content getting shared?
- Are the thought-leaders in my company sharing the content on their social platforms?
The key to inbound success is measurement, and using the data you have. It’s great to have a lot of information, but it’s useless if no actions are being taken on the results.
Kickstart your metrics by assessing your website with our website grader.
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