It’s not enough to just set an inbound marketing strategy and forget it. You need to measure it and continue to tweak and adapt it so it’s reaching its fullest potential. In order to do this, it’s essential to keep up with your analytics across all of your marketing platforms.
Looking into your inbound marketing measurement data can be overwhelming, so we wanted to go over a few of the metrics that you should be keeping your eye on.
1. Reach
The overall reach is the number of people who see your content. You can measure this metric in a number of different ways. First of all, you can start by calculating your potential reach by adding up all your social media followers and email subscribers to estimate the number of people who are able to see your stuff. Don’t forget that some people could be following you in multiple places, so this is not an exact count, but it’s a great way to estimate your potential reach.
Then you’ll want to look into the actual reach of your social media posts, your emails, and your website. Each social media platform has its own form of insights or analytics, but there are a ton of marketing data analytics companies for you to look into to see everything all in one place. Check out the open rates of your marketing emails, then check out the number of sessions your website received on your Google Analytics.
The more people you reach, the more potential customers are able to learn about your business, so be sure to keep an eye on this and make sure it’s steadily increasing. Reach is critical for inbound marketing success.
2. Returning Visitors
The average ratio of new to returning visitors that you want to see on your website is about 80 to 20. You want 80 percent of your website visitors to be brand new to your website and learning about your business for the first time, while 20 percent are returning to your site for your content, to learn more about your services to make a business decision, or to contact you or purchase from you.
This means your website should constantly be growing, and your marketing team should be looking for new ways to generate traffic. This type of inbound marketing really makes a difference.
3. Bounce Rate
Your bounce rate is the percentage of website visitors who immediately exit your website without clicking around your website. If you have a website that isn’t visually appealing, isn’t user-friendly, isn’t mobile responsive, or has a long load time, you might have an extremely high bounce rate. This is because people are having issues with your website and don’t really want to stick around. Pay attention to your bounce rate and make sure it’s not too high because it could be detrimental to your inbound marketing efforts.
4. Conversion Rate
You’ll take a look at your conversion rate on your social media, website contact forms, website opt-ins, and landing pages.
First of all, you want your landing pages to account for about 10-30 percent of all new leads. These are specialized pages that include service copy and a contact or opt-in form above the fold and are typically used within ad campaigns to send visitors directly to the information they’re clicking to learn more about.
Be sure to add a link to your contact form or a landing page to your Facebook Page’s call-to-action, and consider adding short links to your bios on your other platforms to track clicks and conversions.
You’ll want to keep an eye on the pageviews on each of your contact pages and landing pages so that you can calculate your conversion rate by dividing conversions by the total number of visitors.
These are four of the most important metrics to keep an eye on when measuring inbound marketing success. If these numbers are dropping, you need to fix your strategy.
The original version of this post was first published on ReachForce.
- How to Measure Your Inbound Marketing Success - December 12, 2018
