
How do we know what marketing tactics work? The question is probably as old as marketing itself, and one that all marketers – including Inbound Marketers – should be asking themselves regularly.
Fortunately, the answer is in your analytics.
Analytics help you measure, manage and monitor the performance of your marketing tactics. Some have more measurable analytics than others, but when practicing inbound marketing most of the tactics you’ll be executing have specific and measurable key performance indicators (KPIs) that will help you measure success. They can range from the simple - how many people follow you on social media - to the more complex, such as the ratio of website visitors who convert into leads.
Knowing your analytics and regularly monitoring them will allow you to:
There are dozens of data points for measuring inbound marketing performance – and yes, you should analyze them all regularly. Since your website is the hub of our inbound marketing activity, this post will focus on 5 metrics about your website performance you should be regularly monitoring.
This metric has gotten a bad rap lately. Many people view this as a vanity metrics, and they’re right to a degree. This metric by itself cannot pinpoint where you need to make improvements to get more people to your site, but it will alert you to a problem – and if it dips, you can dig into other metrics to find the root cause of the problem. Overall, this metric will allow you to measure the overall growth of your website, which is critical to inbound success.
Traffic source tells you where your visitors are coming from and is a good indicator of how your search engine optimization efforts are performing. There are three primary streams to watch and measure here:
Indexed pages represent the number of pages that search engines have found and catalogued as a component of your website, and that have received at least one organic visit. As your indexed pages grow – a blog is a great way to grow this measure – it will help improve your site’s performance in search results since it's expanding the net you're casting online.
Landing page conversion rate measures the percentage of visitors who fill out a form on a landing page. This metric is critical because most of the time the forms on your landing pages are what help identify if a contact could be considered a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL). The higher the conversion rate the better, although typically a good conversion rate is between 3-5% (this varies depending on the industry).
This is the number of new contacts you received in a given time period. This metric is critical because it tells you a few things:
By regularly monitoring your metrics, you can make your Inbound Marketing more effective, and channel resources into the tactics you know work best. The end results are more leads, more customers and a greater understanding of how you got them. Want to learn more about how to determine what KPIs matter? Download our eBook below!
Topics: Inbound Marketing, Marketing Automation