How We Determine the Metrics for Success With Our Inbound Clients

The word metrics often strike fear in every marketer’s heart because of the following scenarios:

• Data dump.
• Analysis paralysis.
• Too many spreadsheets opened all at once.
• Difficulties in identifying metrics that matter the most.
• And the most dreaded question from various stakeholders: How do we know that your marketing efforts are really working?

We totally get the feeling!

At Lean Labs, metrics and analytics play a huge role in each inbound marketing blueprint that we do for our clients. After all, growth only happens when there’s something that you can measure, understand, and change.

In this blog post, you will learn which metrics we focus on to measure inbound marketing success of our clients. We have identified these metrics after methodically reassessing and evaluating marketing outcomes.

Choosing the metrics of Success

At face value, many metrics don’t mean anything. We understand that most chief marketing officers or business owners don’t care about a huge chunk of the metrics that marketers typically track.

What if you just netted 10,000 Facebook followers this quarter? What if you had 500 downloads of your eBook this month? These examples may look good on paper.

At the end of the day, we understand that our clients care about one thing the most: revenue.

Whether it’s doubling blogging efforts or launching an email campaign for the first time, the metric you must track is revenue. Buckle up as we list down the revenue-driving KPIs that you should be tracking for your inbound marketing campaigns!

1. Website traffic and visits

Hubspot’s Corey Wainwright writes that your website’s traffic are more likely to come from the following sources:

• Search engine results (organic traffic)
• Referrals
• Social media
• Email marketing
• Paid search
• Direct traffic
• Other campaigns such as landing pages

This KPI allows you to directly evaluate your marketing campaign, whether it’s via paid traffic or email marketing. Tracking website visits regularly will help judge the impact of your various marketing strategies.

Which channels do most of your visitors come from? Which page in your website do they reach first? What sort of keywords bring visitors to your site?

These questions are just examples of the type of information you’ll gather if you track and evaluate your website traffic and visits through Google Analytics and marketing automation platforms such as Hubspot.

Take Hubspot’s Sources Report feature for instance. In the report, for each of these traffic sources, you get to see the number of unique visits during a specific period. Each visitor is recognized by the Hubspot tracking code installed on your website. The tracking code installs a cookie in each visitor’s browser because a single website visitor can possibly visit your site multiple times.

2. Time on Site

Marketers cannot seem to agree about this KPI. There are folks who consider time on site as a waste of time while some are quick to point out that it’s one of the most important metrics to evaluate.

At Lean Labs, we consider Time on Site as one of the indicators of any given campaign’s success. For Hubspot’s Greg Brown, this metric is particularly indicative of overall reader engagement. If a visitor is spending a lot of time on your site, hopping from one page to another, there’s a huge chance that he or she’s deeply engaged.

There are several ways you can do to increase the time spent by visitors on your website. Creating audience-focused and actionable content tops the list.

Looking at the web page’s bounce rate is also equally important. By doing so, you’d be able to make adjustments or build new strategies on a specific page to keep your visitors engaged.

3. Conversion Rate

Your conversion rate will clue you in on how well your organic and social media traffic is converting. Your site’s conversion rate can be broken down into the following:

Visitor-to-Lead Ratio

This is the measurement of the number of website visitors that convert into leads. Say for every unique 100 visitors to your website, you have five of those that convert into leads. This means you have a 5 percent visitor-to-lead ratio.

One good way to use visitor-to-lead ratio to your advantage is to compare it with the number of your website visits. For example, if your website visits are increasing but the visitor-to-lead ratio demonstrates otherwise, find out if you can change something on your page, say change the CTA or add a landing page.

Lead-to-Customer Ratio

Once you’ve converted visitors to leads, it’s important to know how many of these leads are converted to customers by your sales team. By and large, this conversion rate metric provides you with the opportunity to calculate your inbound marketing ROI.

When tracking and measuring conversion rates, lead scoring accurately evaluates the ability of both your marketing and sales team in generating leads. At Lean Labs, we use Hubspot’s automated lead scoring to differentiate Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) from Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs).

Check out how one of our client’s web page redesign increased their Visits-To-Contact Conversion Rate by 271 percent.

4. Landing Page Conversion Rate

Your landing page can make or break your marketing campaigns. It doesn’t really matter how polished it looks or if there’s tons of traffic directed to it. Remember that what matters the most is whether or not it’s converting visitors to leads. It’s possible to have sky-high search engine traffic but poor landing page conversion rate.

To boost your landing page conversion rate, test and change certain elements for continuous improvement. This could mean adding social proof at the bottom of your CTA or changing headers.

Check out ConversionXL’s ultimate guide to landing page optimization.

Keep in mind that the same landing page that resulted in more conversions in June may not give the same set of results in December. Stay on top of your conversion rates by continuously A/B testing your landing pages.

5. Organic Traffic

Because inbound marketing is all about pulling prospects to your brand, organic traffic is one KPI that will help pinpoint if your campaigns were a success.

High organic traffic means brand awareness among your prospects is high because they are arriving on your website without going through search, social media, and other marketing channels.

To drill down the effectiveness of your campaigns via organic traffic, track and monitor the following:

• Percentage of your leads that come from organic search (can be further categorized to desktop and mobile)
• Percentage of your leads that come in using branded keywords
• Percentage of your leads that come from other campaigns such as social
• The number of customers you acquire via organic search

Crafting viral and useful content is one good way to increase organic traffic to your website. As professor of marketing at Wharton Business School Jonah Berger points out, prospects and customers will most likely talk about your product or service if you add in personal relevance and emotional engagement to your product or idea.

6. Leads Generated

Last but definitely not the least, Leads Generated is another important ROI metric that you should not overlook. Once you’ve captured a lead, the contact details you provided is a good start to nurture them down the sales funnel.

Picking the Right Tool to Track Revenue Metrics

Getting started in tracking ROI metrics may be overwhelming. However, the key point here is just to start and get the most out of what you currently have. You don’t have to get all tools all at once.

What’s more important is to find a solution that will support both quantitative and qualitative analysis of your marketing goals, such as what to measure, understanding the data, and a way to improve your current figures.

Which marketing metric are you having difficulties with right now?