What inbound marketing metrics should you measure to know if your strategy is succeeding?
Knowing how to answer this question is fundamental, because we already know that in marketing, what cannot be measured does not exist. To give you a cable, in this article we share the 15 most important metrics in inbound marketing and we give you advice to choose the most suitable in each case.
How do you decide which inbound marketing metrics to use?
The most appropriate inbound marketing metrics will depend on the Goals of your strategy. Inbound marketing should serve to contribute to the goals of the overall marketing plan, and these in turn should align with the business goals of the entire company.
We should also keep in mind that the most relevant metrics vary depending on the funnel stage where are the potential customers:
- In the phase of attraction, our main goal is to drive quality traffic to our brand site. Thus, the most important metrics will be related to visits: unique visitors, page views, traffic sources, bounce rate…
- In the phase of consideration, we try to convert these visitors into prospects or potential customers. Therefore, we will look at metrics such as the performance of our landing pages, the number and quality of leads generated, or the click-through rate on calls to action.
- Finally, in the phase of conversion, the star metric is sales. Here, we will need to analyze metrics like lead-to-sales conversion rate, average order amount, or conversion attribution.
Once you have decided which metrics are most important to you, it is essential that you are consistent in measuring them. Define the measurement tools and methods you are going to use and establish periodic checks to do a good follow-up.
The 15 most important inbound marketing metrics
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Website visits. This metric gives us a general idea of how attractive our content is. According to Mike Lieberman, CEO of Square2Marketing, the ideal is for visits to increase by 10% each month.
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Unique and regular visitors. This metric lets us know if users visit our page multiple times over a certain period of time. If we detect that many visitors are not returning, we may create a remarketing list to keep in touch with them.
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Average time on page. This metric, closely related to the bounce rate, helps us to assess the user experience of our website and the relevance of content for visitors. If we detect that the permanence on the web is very low, it is a good idea to do an audit to detect possible usability problems.
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Visits by traffic source. With this metric, we can know which channels are the most effective in attracting visitors and which ones we should work better.
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keyword ranking. SEO is a basic ingredient of inbound marketing, because it allows us to attract a continuous flow of visitors over the long term. Therefore, we need to monitor the keywords we rank for and track the competition.
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inbound links. Generating links from other quality sites in our industry is essential to improve search engine positioning. This metric allows us to measure whether we are achieving it and take action if necessary.
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Number of leads. This metric allows us to see if we manage to generate enough leads over a given period. As was the case for site traffic, the ideal is that it increases each month.
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Prospect Ranking. Not only is the quantity of leads generated important, but also their quality. Through a lead scoring algorithm, we will classify the leads generated into different categories (for example, unqualified, qualified for marketing and qualified for sales) and thus we will be able to compare them and see the evolution over time.
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Conversion rate of visitors to leads. This metric is obtained by dividing the leads obtained during a given period by the site visitors during this same period and multiplying by 100 to obtain a percentage.
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Email open rate. Email marketing is an essential part of lead nurturing – the process of nurturing leads on the path to becoming customers. The opening rate allows us to know if our subscribers are really interested in us and if we write attractive topics.
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Email click-through rate. This email marketing metric allows us to gauge how effective our email content is in getting users to take an action, such as visiting a product page on your website.
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Conversion rate per landing page. Your site’s landing pages should be maximized to get the user to perform a certain action, such as filling out a form to upload content. They are a key element of success, so it is important to frequently measure their performance and test different elements. Something as simple as changing the color of the CTA button can give your conversions a boost.
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Conversion rate from leads to sales. This metric aims to measure the effectiveness of our lead nurturing process, i.e. whether we manage to convert leads into customers. It is calculated the same way as the visitors-to-leads conversion rate, replacing leads with sales and visitors with leads.
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Cart abandonment rate. Abandoned carts are a big problem for many online businesses. To limit this number, try remarketing campaigns focused on basket retrieval.
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Average customer lifetime value. This metric represents the total benefits generated by a customer throughout their stay with the brand, i.e. the average amount of a purchase by the number of purchases per year and the number of years during which he remains faithful. It helps us assess the long-term profitability and sustainability of our marketing.