5 Ways to Measure Your Website's Inbound Marketing Performance

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:

1. Identifying what’s working
2. Identifying what’s not working
3. Identifying ways to improve
4. Implementing more of the tactics that work to improve marketing performance

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.

1. Sessions

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.

2. Traffic Source

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:

• Direct Traffic comes from people who have typed your website’s URL directly into their browser, visited your web pages via a bookmark, or clicked on an untagged link from an email or document you produced

• Organic Traffic comes from a link found on a search engine results page, a good indicator of your SEO efforts and how easily people are finding your content

• Referral Traffic comes from links on other websites that send visitors to a page on your website. Referral traffic represents inbound links that help boost your site’s performance in search engine rankings

3. Indexed Pages

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.

4. Landing Page Conversion Rate

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).

5. New Contacts

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:

1. Of the new visitors to your site, are enough of them converting to become new contacts? If the answer is no, then you might want to look at increasing conversion opportunities throughout your site.
2. Combine the new contact metric with your MQL metric; by looking at these together you can see of the new contacts coming to your site, are enough of them MQLs? If not, you’re most likely generating low quality traffic. This could lead you to change the content you blog about or potentially revisit how you are classifying MQLs.

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!