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If you’re not already using analytics to monitor and optimise your marketing campaigns then imagine this scenario. If your marketing budget was cut in half today, how would you know which channels to pull back on and which to focus on?
Data is playing an increasingly powerful role in the world of digital marketing, helping marketers properly understand the results from their campaigns. Everything from the number of Twitter impressions to your annual turnover can provide insights into whether your marketing strategy is working, and more specifically which tactics are achieving the best results.
Saying that, there are certain metrics that can give you more accurate insights into your campaign performance. Avoid focusing on vanity metrics such as Instagram followers, page views or registered users. Whilst these can paint a picture of your performance on certain channels, they don’t really add anything to your bottom line. It can be useful to keep an eye on these metrics, but don’t let them influence your strategy too much.
With this in mind, here are 10 key inbound marketing metrics that you should be tracking…
ROI
Whilst it can often be difficult to accurately calculate the ROI of each individual marketing effort, it’s something you should keep in mind at all times. Whether you’re investing time, money, resources or all three, you need to consider whether your campaign is generating a sufficient return. It’s up to you to decide whether this return is significant enough to continue with that campaign in the future.
There’s several ways you can work out ROI. Calculating ROI post-campaign should be easy enough. Simply work out the financial results of the campaign and divide this by the cost of the campaign. For example, if you spent £10,000 on a campaign which generated £50,000 in revenue your ROI would be 500%. It can be a little more tricky to estimate the ROI before starting a campaign, but it’s still easily doable.
LEADS
A month-on-month decrease in leads is a tell-tale sign that something’s going wrong. At the end of the day, if you’re not generating any leads then your sales pipeline will dry up fast. Tracking leads can be a great way to see that something needs to change before your sales revenue is affected.
WEBSITE TRAFFIC
Whilst website traffic is in fact a vanity metric, it’s still something that you should be tracking. Websites have long acted as a ‘shop front’ in the online world, and it’s usually the first place a customer will visit to find out more about your brand. Therefore, it only makes sense to keep an eye on the amount of traffic visiting your site. It’s easy enough to track this metric too; all you really need is a Google Analytics account linked to your website.
CUSTOMER LIFETIME VALUE
Customer Lifetime Value, also known as CLV or LTV depending who you ask, is simply the total worth of a customer over the length of their relationship with your business. It’s easy enough to calculate and can be instrumental in working out other stats such as estimated ROI. It can also be a useful metric to bear in mind when working out how to divide your marketing strategy between the retention of existing customers and the acquisition of new ones.
WEBSITE BOUNCE RATE
Using this figure in conjunction with website traffic can be a great way to measure relevant website traffic. Whereas understanding how many people are visiting your website is certainly useful to know, it’s far more important to understand how many people are visiting your website with some form of interest or intent.
To work out the number of relevant users simply take the number of website visits, divide it by 100 and multiply it by (100 minus your bounce rate). For example, if you received 100,000 website visits with a bounce rate of 77%, you would be attracting 23,000 relevant website visitors.
KEYWORD RANKINGS
Keyword rankings can be a great way to tell which content is having an impact on your search rankings and to help drive your future content schedule. For example, if you’ve recently produced a piece of content on digital agencies in Yorkshire and notice that your ranking has gone up for a similar search term, you can tell the content was successful. On the other hand, you could take a look at keywords that you’re close to ranking on page one and craft some content around these. There’s a whole load of tools that you can use to monitor keyword rankings, with our go-to tool being AWR Cloud. It allows you to monitor rankings across 50+ countries, pull in-depth reports and even track the search rankings of your competitors.
TRAFFIC SOURCES
Understanding where your website traffic is coming from is a great way to work out which marketing channels are achieving the best results. Google Analytics pulls data from several sources including social media, organic traffic, email, referrals, direct traffic and paid media. From here, you can click into each channel to see a further breakdown of where the traffic has come from.
SOCIAL MEDIA ENGAGEMENT
Whilst there’s nothing wrong with keeping track of social media followers and impressions, it’s the engagement that really matters. This metric can give you a real insight into whether or not your social content is working. It can also be useful for working out which social channels are most effective. For example, you could have 20,000 Twitter followers and 5,000 Instagram followers, but if you’re getting more engagement on Instagram you should be focusing your efforts here.
LANDING PAGE CONVERSION RATES
If you’re doing inbound marketing right, then odds are you’ll be using landing pages. These will no doubt play an instrumental part in lead generation for your business. Keeping an eye on the conversion rates of your landing pages, and website pages for that matter, can be another great way to ensure your sales pipeline doesn’t dry up. It will also help you understand which landing pages could be optimised to drive more conversions.
SALES REVENUE
No matter how much engagement you’re getting, leads you’re generating and relevant traffic you’re driving to your website, none of it will mean anything if your business runs out of money. Now this is a very extreme scenario, but if you’re not driving any sales revenue then you can’t deem your marketing to be a success. Saying that, if you’re tracking all the right metrics then generating a steady stream of revenue shouldn’t be a problem.
Compared to traditional marketing techniques such as TV and radio, inbound marketing is significantly easier to track. Due to the abundance of analytics tools out there, you shouldn’t have any trouble monitoring these 10 metrics and using them to optimise your campaigns. From free tools such as Google Analytics to enterprise level CMS platforms such as Hubspot, there will no doubt be something within your budget.
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