10 Inbound Marketing Analytics to Watch
Inbound marketing can generate a massive amount of new business for your company - but how do you really know if it's working? The pillar of inbound marketing is analytics. This informs all your inbound efforts and how you tweak your content and strategy to reach more people.
However with the wealth of information at your fingertips it's easy to fall into data overload. If you're trying to track your inbound marketing efforts, below are the top Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to watch.
1. Form Fills
Form fills are one of the biggest KPIs for nearly every business online. Whether it's a form for a download, contact us form or request an estimate, forms are a direct way for users to get in touch with your business. It's important to track how many form fills you are getting across the board to track your total online leads.
2. Website Traffic
It's important to know how many people are coming to your website, and from where. Website traffic is especially important in inbound marketing since it shows the effectiveness of your various inbound links (social media, email, landing pages, etc.). When tracking traffic, you'll want to watch for patterns over time - does your traffic change with the seasons? Does it increase month over month?
3. Time on Page
Similarly to website traffic, it's useful to know how long people are sticking around on your website. It's important to filter time on page through various areas of the website - people will typically leave a landing page or contact us page quickly, but you want them to spend more time on your blogs and service pages. Like with website traffic, you'll want to pay attention to patterns and activity on different parts of the website.
4. Bounce Rate
The final piece of your website activity is your bounce rate, which is the percentage of people who leave your website after only viewing one page. Like with time on page, it's important to look at it on a page-by-page basis. Landing pages and blogs will typically have bounce rates between 80-90%, but you want your service or product pages to be around 60%.
5. Social Media Engagement
Many business owners focus on the number of followers they have on social media, but that's not always a good KPI. Engagement is much more useful - how many shares, likes, comments, clicks, etc. your content receives. Your engagement rate is a gauge of whether or not your followers find your content useful. For inbound marketing, this can be a window into which campaigns are of most interest to your audience.
6. Ad Conversions
Ad conversions are an obvious KPI, but one worth mentioning. The end goal of your online advertising is a conversion of some sort - usually this is a form fill, phone call or direct purchase. Tracking these conversions allows you to see how well your ad is performing. Do a lot of people view your ads, but you don't see many conversions? That's a sign it's time to change up your landing page.
7. Organic Search Rankings
Organic search is the slow-and-steady arm of your inbound marketing strategy. Keywords and SEO should be a part of all your inbound marketing efforts, and analyzing their performance can yield interesting results. You may find that your efforts are bringing in more organic leads, which means more eyeballs on your content.
8. Email Click-Through Rate
There are many email metrics you can dig into, but generally the most important is your click-through rate. This looks at the percentage of people who received your email who then clicked on at least one link in the email. email click-through rate will show you how many people are coming to your website from your emails and specifically what kind of content offer draws them in.
9. Customer Acquisition Costs
This metric requires the most work to calculate, but is one of the most important to know. Your Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC) is how much money you spend to gain one new customer. This includes ad spend, labor costs and material costs. There are several different formulas, but this interactive calculator from Nickelled is simple to use and read.
10. Inbound Marketing ROI
This is the ultimate inbound marketing analytic to watch, but it requires you to first calculate the other metrics in this list. Your ultimate goal with your inbound marketing is to generate more business. If you're spending more time, money and labor creating your inbound campaigns than you are getting back out of it, it's time to re-evaluate your goals. We have a free marketing ROI calculator you can use to create this metric.
Watch these analytics to know how your inbound marketing is performing. A tool like HubSpot makes it easy to track all these metrics in one place, but you can also enlist your team to track marketing progress. Assign each team member certain metrics to track to make the process more manageable. Armed with your data, you can then see what's working and what isn't working, and continuously improve your marketing to get more leads.
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