Irrespective of one’s experience in the digital marketing scene, learning how to measure inbound marketing is of the essence. This is because it can effectively give marketers an edge over the competition.
Inbound marketing leans heavily on the tenets that make up digital marketing. Therefore, to effectively launch a proper inbound marketing campaign, you should be in tune with what the digital space has to offer.
Traditional digital marketing tactics were intended to try to convert new website visitors into instant customers. On the other hand, inbound marketing involves a long-term strategy. There’s a lot of cajoling involved over an extended period of time, stretching, weeks, months, and even years before customers are primed to make their first purchase. It’s a waiting game.
Due to the unique approach inbound marketing uses to entice customers, you need to have a varied set of tools and metrics to measure the success of a campaign. In our analysis, we’ll highlight steps on how to prepare for tracking and cover a couple of the top metrics every digital marketer needs to focus on.
Before launching the inbound marketing campaign, you need to have the right tools. Everyone on your team can provide necessary guidance on how to generate more leads and increase sales. Medium-sized businesses can leverage their resources by making use of Google Analytics.
They can also get more bang for their buck by using a tag manager platform like Google Tag Manager which will solve their website needs.
How?
Instead of using multiple lines of code to represent the various suites of digital tools like web analytics software, popup offer tools, survey tools and marketing automation platforms, they can harness the power of Google Tag Manager. This only requires a single snippet of code on the website.
Having this tool ensures that small and medium-sized companies don’t have to spend copious amounts to hire a web developer to maintain their sites on a regular basis.
With the tracking code in place, you can define your goals in Google Analytics. Goals typically represent actions taken on the website to represent success. The goals could be things like filling out contract forms, downloading eBooks or making online purchases.
Setting goals in Google Analytics ensure that you can analyze what pages and traffic sources are a success. It’s also recommended to set-up IP exclusion filters for employees, whether they work at home or in the office.
Inbound Marketing Metrics
While it’s true that web analytics tools actually offer hundreds of different metrics about how visitors are responding to a website and where they are going to next, the barrage of data can ultimately lead to inaction. This is because most analysts tend to be overwhelmed by the large data and become unsure how to measure inbound marketing.
To avert this, we’ve analyzed a list of the most vital inbound metrics every business should focus on…
1. Website Goals
Primary website goals refer to the most important actions visitors can make once they visit a site. For e-commerce websites, making an online sale is the primary goal. While for service businesses, making phone calls and the filling of contact form submissions is the usually the primary goal.
Secondary website goals refer to the less integral actions visitors take on a website. While they don’t impact the revenue like primary goals, they are still important since they indicate above-average engagement.
Key Takeaway: As the most important contributor to success, businesses need to track their primary website goals. Websites like Google Analytics, Call Tracking Software, and Marketing Automation Platforms can help businesses keep track of their primary site goal.
2. Visitor Conversion Rate
To calculate this metric, one needs to divide the number of goal completions by the total number of visitors. On average, eCommerce websites usually register visitor conversion rates of 2%. Service-based websites have conversion rates that lie between 6% – 10%.
Key Takeaway: Businesses that register lower visitor conversion rates usually have a traffic quality issue or a website issue. Resolution of these issues can lead to increased visitor conversion rates. Google Analytics and Marketing Automation Platform are tools one can use to drive the numbers higher.
3. Landing Page Conversion Rates
Marketers who are eager to learn how to measure inbound marketing often query how they can boost their landing page conversion rates. To get the figure, one needs to divide the number of the form submissions by the number of website visitors.
Landing page conversion rates are not set in stone; therefore, they can vary from time to time. The statistics show that most people consider 30% to be a normal conversion rate. Because of the vagaries of marketing, it’s not unusually to hear of dips by up to 10% or incremental rises that stretch out to 50%.
Key Takeaway: Landing page conversion rate is important because it accurately depicts how effective the landing page is at generating leads. To track the landing page conversion rates, tools like Google Analytics and Marketing Automation Platform are imperative.
4. Nurturing Funnel Completion Rate
This figure represents the percentage of website leads who go on to make purchases. When researching on how to measure inbound marketing, you should always consider the nature of the early crowd that shows up at the website.
This sets the key distinction between tradition digital marketing and current inbound practices employed to ensure progress.
Key Takeaway: Monitoring every step customers make can help gain a comprehension of their true motives and learn how best to boost the conversion rate. Marketing Automation Platform and Manual Calculation are vital to realizing higher figures.
5. Social Media Engagement
Marketers seeking to learn about how to measure inbound marketing often seem dazed by the difference between social media reach and social media engagement.
There’s a great dissimilarity between the two. Reach only takes into account the size of the audience. Engagement is a measure of how fans and followers are engaging with the brand and content.
Key Takeaway: Making regular posts, incorporating popular hashtags in posts, and engaging with followers helps increase the engagement numbers.
