Are You Tracking the Right Metrics in Your Inbound Marketing Campaigns?

You’ve gathered all your shiny new landing pages, blog posts and content offers and started running your inbound marketing campaigns. Now you can sit back and relax, right?

But wait, your work doesn’t stop there. How do you know whether your campaigns are working? You need to measure your results and adjust accordingly.

What exactly do you measure here? You need to define your top-level marketing goals first. Then look at more specific measures to see if each component of your campaign is optimized to lead you to those goals.

Ultimate Top Level Goals: These usually refer to the number of leads or sales generated and ensuring these leads are qualified.

Top level goals can be defined by, for example:

• Filling in a sales enquiry form or a bottom-of-the-funnel lead offer
• Viewing a key page on your website
  Make sure these key pages have linked “Thank You” pages so you can track their performance in Google Analytics or your marketing automation software.

Implementation Level Goals: This is where you examine whether your campaign’s components are performing as they should be.

To measure these, look at the following metrics

• Landing Page Conversion Rates

This examines how effective your landing pages are in converting visitors to leads and is calculated with Form Submissions / Landing Page Visitors.

• Workflow Completion Rate:

Since inbound marketing is all about targeting leads at all stages of the buyer’s journey, how effective are your lead nurturing workflows? (You do have one set up, right?). Examine how many leads actually complete the workflow or at which point they stop engaging. You want to know how many of these enrolled leads turn into customers. Inbound Email: Since email marketing is all about lead nurturing, monitor your email open rates, click-through rates or unsubscribe rates. Also consider looking at your hard bounced rates to see the quality of your email database.

• Social Media Activity:

Is your content attracting an audience and resonating with your audience or building your brand? Monitor the Likes, Comments, Shares and Subscriptions / Followers for your socials media platforms to measure engagement.

• Views & Time Spent On Blog Posts

You’ve spent so much time creating these exquisite blog posts, I’m sure you want them to be read and appreciated right? Check the number of views on each blog posts to find out. You can go one step further to see the time spent on your blog posts on Google Analytics.

• Blog Posts Keyword Ranking: 
  

Is your blog content being found via search? Ensure your blog posts are optimised for the correct keywords (long-tail keywords tend to be less competitive) and monitor their rankings. You want all that effort to be seen, read and appreciated.

Effective inbound marketing is all about generating the right data and using data to tell a story or make further recommendations. Be clear of your top-level goals (what is the point of this entire inbound marketing exercise?), then drill down to find the right metrics to monitor and optimise.