Weekly Inbound Marketing Metrics You Should be Tracking

1. Website Visits

Simply put, the number of site visits measures people who visit your site during a given period of time. This is a great metric to measure month-to-month for patterns, however, it can also be a good indicator of whether or not your inbound tactics are working. If you aren’t getting people to your site, people aren’t seeing your site content, and there is clearly a missing component in your marketing efforts whether it be failed social media promotion, not providing content your audience wants to read in emails, a broken link, etc. There are many other reasons people may not be getting to your site, but figure out what those reasons are so that you aren’t missing out on potential customers due to situations in your control.

This metric can easily be measured through free tools, like Google Analytics, so there’s no reason to not monitor it. For more robust monitoring that shows how traffic converts to leads and ultimately customers, HubSpot is a fantastic tool for analytics.

2. Visitor to lead conversion 

One of the most important things to track on the site is visitor to lead conversion.  Visitor to lead conversion (VTL) is the number of visitors who not only visit the page, but also complete a specific conversion action, whether it’s clicking on a call-to-action (CTA), form, or any offer you put on your site for conversion purposes. Having solid landing pages increase your odds that visitors will convert to leads, and eventually customers. Watching your VTL allows you to see what is and is not working on your landing pages. Ask questions like “are our offers compelling for the reader?” “Are our CTAs placed correctly and do they convey a clear action the visitor should take?” If your weekly VTL is down, be sure to check up on these and test which messaging and format works best for your company and resonates with your visitors.

For tracking VTL, a platform like Hubspot can give you detailed conversion insights to help improve your marketing and is definitely worth the investment.

3. Website Engagement

So you’ve gotten people to your site, your marketing efforts are working, but what do your visitors do once they are on the site? It’s not enough to just count the visit as a success. You need to monitor bounce rate, time on site, page views, the path they follow throughout your site, etc. This is where you analyze the content to figure out where your visitors are spending their time, what grabs their attention and what they are curious about so that you can best optimize from there. The best part is that it’s simple to obtain these metrics.

Using a tool like Google Analytics will provide you with the necessary information needed to monitor engagement, assess the results, and formulate a strategy based off those findings.

4. Email Engagement

Email is one of the most useful tools to have in your toolbox in terms of inbound marketing. Why? Emails are sent to a targeted list of people who are already interested in your company because they opted-in to receive these emails. Sending emails to them increases your opportunities to give them what they want and in turn, is a great way to increase your click through rate and generate leads. If clicks or open rates are down the week after sending an email, take a look at the offer you sent, and even the subject line. Evaluate and see if there is anything you can improve on for future emails. Also, be sure that your contact list is updated frequently to ensure all emails are current. This can also affect your weekly metrics.

Using tools like MailChimp or HubSpot can help you track email engagement so that you can improve upon your strategy. Track if people click on your offer within the email as this is the best metric to gage if your offers are resonating with your audience or not. If they don’t care about the content in the email, they won’t convert.

5. Social Engagement

Tracking social engagement is critical because social is a way you share the content on your site and expand reach. In addition, search engines use signals from social media sharing to determine an article’s popularity, which will give you a higher page ranking. Social engagement is basically a way that others vote for your site. The more votes you get, the more important search engines think you are. If your social engagement, whether it likes, favorites, etc., is down, it’s time to rethink your social strategy or increase your efforts.

Social media platforms typically have analytics you can refer to on their site to view your performance. However, if you want a comprehensive view, look into using a service like Hootsuite or HubSpot that can give you a robust overview of your social landscape. 

Whether you’re using HubSpot or another platform, you can see, there are many tools that can help you track these analytics. If you aren’t currently making time to monitor metrics regularly, it’s time you start doing so.

While it is important to keep track of your analytics, obsessing over them and checking them daily (or worse, hourly) is just a waste of your time. Checking weekly will keep you sane while also moving your marketing efforts forward.