B2B Inbound Marketing is a methodology that aims to attract customers by creating valuable content and experiences that are tailored to addressing the specific challenges that each individual is looking to address.
Inbound Marketing uses digital marketing tactics, such as blogging and improving SEO, to draw in qualified visitors and generate leads. Most importantly, it is a holistic philosophy that puts the customers’ needs first.
Just like any other marketing campaign, the success of your Inbound Marketing strategy is often measured by data.
Why are Inbound Marketing metrics important?
Analytics and reporting data give your organization insights into current performance and how making small changes impact the outcome of your entire strategy. By using analytics to identify strengths and weaknesses in your current program, your company gains invaluable insight into how you can improve and optimize campaigns moving forward.
Despite its importance, analyzing an Inbound Marketing program is incredibly complex. There are a vast amount of reporting and data points, which all need to be reviewed in order to optimize the entire strategy.
That’s why, in this blog, we have created a list of the top 10 most important metrics for any Inbound Marketing program.
The top 10 Inbound Marketing metrics
#1 - Website visitors
The most important aspect of Inbound Marketing is getting the right content in front of the right audience. Tracking the visits to your website and blog give you a strong idea of whether or not your content strategy efforts are effective.
#2 - Conversion rates
The conversion rate is the most important key performance indicator in any Inbound Marketing strategy, giving your marketing team clear insight into how many prospects or customers have taken a desired action.
Conversion rates can come from a range of sources, including CTAs on your blog posts, forms on landing pages, email click-throughs or paid marketing campaigns.
#3 - Leads
To your business, a lead is a lead...right? Not in the Inbound Marketing world. There are a range of different leads from prospects, leads, marketing-qualified leads (MQLs), sales-qualified leads (SQLs) and more.
Those interested in your business are considered leads, but they aren’t necessarily ready to buy immediately. It’s your job to nurture these leads and push them down the funnel so that they become MQLs and SQLs.
#4 - Organic search traffic
Organic search tells you how many sessions or visitors your website is getting from search engines. This is the entire premise of Inbound Marketing, which as a philosophy believes in generating traffic organically through relevant, helpful content and then getting ranked.
#5 - Email click-through
Emails are an important element of your inbound marketing campaigns. Emails are used to further engage a lead after they have already expressed an interest in your brand. That means your email click analytics is a crucial component in tracking, and bettering, the success of your email campaigns.
#6 - Keyword rankings
The only way your website will be found through organic search is if you're hitting the right keywords that your target audience is searching for. Keyword research helps you to find new keywords that you need to be ranking better for, as well as aligning your content strategy with the keywords that you want to rank for. Ranking your keywords on the search engine results pages - SERP - is also a major objective, the user enters their search query (often using specific terms and phrases known as keywords), upon which the search engine presents them with a SERP.
#7 - Inbound links
To build search authority on your topic of expertise and improve your search rankings through search engine optimization (SEO) backlinks go a long way. A backlink, or inbound link, is a link that you get back to your website from other websites.
To optimize how this impacts your SEO, you ideally want to receive backlinks from highly-respected websites that are ranking well. Measuring your inbound links gives your business an idea of how well you are getting other people and other companies interested and engaged with your content.
#8 - Social media engagement
Social media is an important tool for any Inbound Marketing campaign, helping to drive brand awareness and generate more website traffic. There are different ways to measure social media metrics, but it’s important to measure how people are engaging with your brand.
Focus on areas such as likes, shares and comments. Tracking social media engagement will help you determine which type of content appeals to your customers.
#9 - Bounce rate
Bounce rate refers to the percentage of visitors who enter your website, and then leave immediately rather than continuing to view other pages within the same website. High bounce rates typically coincide with low conversion rates.
If your website has high bounce rates, it could mean that you need to provide a better overall user experience or that your content isn’t engaging your target audience.
#10 - Sessions
This gives you the ability to track all interactions that each visitor has across your website, including page views, form submissions, CTA clicks and much more - until they have been inactive for 30 minutes or longer, after that a new session begins.
You can use session data to determine the user experience, and the general level of engagement that visitors are having once they land on your website.
Want to learn more about Inbound Marketing and how you can improve your program through reporting and analytics? Contact The Brit Agency today. Our team of Inbound Marketing experts would love to answer your questions.
