4 key metrics of your inbound marketing strategy

It can be hard juggling the day to day demands of business while still paying close attention to your inbound marketing strategy - especially when it comes to analysing your ROI.

If you feel this way, you’re not alone. HubSpot’s State of Inbound 2017 reported that 40% of marketers found proving marketing ROI as their primary challenge. When it comes to ROI — and it always does — it’s about quality versus quantity, which can often mean getting more out of less. But the sheer volume and variety of data available these days, often at the click of a mouse, can be more of a curse than a blessing.

So, how do you know you’re drilling into the most important data streams? We’ve identified four key metrics you should be focusing on, in order to improve the success of your inbound marketing strategy.

Traffic

As obvious as this one may seem, it’s easy to take your web traffic data for granted. It is, however, one of the best ways to analyse not only the reach and impact, but the success of your inbound marketing. Ideally, you want to know who is using what, and from where to access your business so you can get a full picture of your audiences’ preferred channels. Your traffic data helps to create that picture.

If for example, 90% of your traffic is coming from one particular social media source, but you’re only committing a fraction of your spend to that area, then you should be tweaking your spend, or at least investigating why this is happening. Conversely, if you’re pouring dollar after dollar into less fruitful channels, you can decrease your spend accordingly. But it’s not just about the here and now - analysing traffic trends can enable you to adjust your marketing spend before your audiences shift channels.

Landing page conversion rate

Just as you desire to know who is using what from where to access your business, you also want to know who isn’t. Your landing page conversion rate is the percentage of visitors that completed a predetermined action, like signing up for a newsletter, downloading your informative eBook, or purchasing your products or services while on your website. Paying close attention to your conversion rate allows you to determine if you’re attracting the right traffic to your site.

Ultimately, if your visitors aren’t converting, then it’s possible you didn’t have what they were looking for, or didn't present it to them in a compelling way. You can slice you conversions into three broad categories:

• Visitor to lead conversion rate- the percentage of website visitors who become leads

• Lead to customer conversion rate- the percentage of leads who become customers

• Visitor to customer conversion rate- the percentage of visitors who became customers

By tracking and regularly analysing these metrics, you’ll get a clear idea of the weak spots in your inbound marketing funnel, and where you can implement change.

Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)

Clicks and views are great, but when it comes to proving marketing ROI, understanding your Cost Per Acquisition (or CPA) is crucial. Your CPA is the amount you have to spend to attract a new paying customer. Where your conversion rate lets you see how many people have become non-revenue generating leads, CPA is about bringing dollars back to the business, and therefore what you’re willing to spend to acquire a customer needs to align with how much your business makes from them. CPA is one of the best metrics to determine the success of your marketing strategy and it’s well worth monitoring.

Keyword and topic rankings

In order to thrive in today’s search engine dominated web landscape, understanding keywords, or more recently, keyword topics are essential. The newest evolution of SEO, known as the “topic cluster” model consists of a single “pillar” that acts as the main hub of topic content. It's a more efficient way of linking and sorting keywords that reduces the search competition within a site. Instead of search results coming from a massive pool of keywords through your master URL, searches use topic clusters for more refined results.

Tracking and understanding how well your website is ranking for keyword topics is crucial to improving your placement in search engine results.

So, those are the four metrics you should focus your efforts on, that really matter in improving your inbound strategy. Want to stay up-to-date with the ever-changing world of inbound? Subscribe to our blog for the latest trends and insights!