“Measure twice, cut once” – a wise, anonymous carpenter

Measurement and analytics are crucial to the success of an inbound marketing program.  If you’re not measuring what works and what doesn’t, you’ll likely miss your target of generating inbound leads that will eventually lead to revenue.  What should you measure and how should you measure it?  There are free web measurement tools available to anyone with a website (e.g. – Google Analytics) as well as paid tools like HubSpot that measure blog, landing page conversions and sales in addition to website statistics.  Here are suggestions on what you should be measuring:

Website Visitors

A steady increase in monthly website visitors is a good indication that your search engine optimization and blogging efforts are working.  However, there are many other elements to the sources of your website traffic that you should be monitoring:

Organic Search Results

Both of the web analytic tools mentioned earlier will show you which keyword phrases are bringing traffic to your site.  Some of them will be keyword phrases that you have been targeting.  This is an indication that your inbound marketing efforts are bearing fruit and also direction for which keyword phrases you should be targeting in your blogging and content creation efforts.  You will probably also notice that you’re being found with keyword phrases that you may not have been targeting – add these to your keyword and content creation strategies.

Visits by Page

Web analytic tools also let you measure which of your website pages are being viewed by visitors.  If you’re blogging frequently, you will likely find that your blog posts are getting a good deal of traffic.  Use this data to identify which of your blog posts are getting the most views.  Find the common threads in your popular blog posts and replicate them in future articles.  Keep in mind that blog posts are “evergreen” marketing assets – they will continue to generate page visits well after they’ve been published.

Social Media and Website Referrals

You should also be measuring your social media referrals – this is where someone follows a link from a social media site like LinkedIn or Facebook to your website.  This data is helpful in identifying the social media channels where your audience is most active.  Likewise, web analytic tools will also identify those websites that are providing links that your visitors follow to your site.

Lead Conversions - Converting Website Visitors to Leads

While it’s important to grow website traffic, it’s even more important to convert that traffic to leads.  A website visitor becomes a lead by clicking through a call-to-action (e.g. - Download Free eBook!) and completing a form on a landing page that provides the data (typically name, e-mail address and company) that brings the visitor into your marketing database.  A visitor will complete the form in order to receive your content offer, typically an eBook, whitepaper, video or webinar.

Calls-to-Action and Landing Pages

The first objective of your inbound marketing efforts is to attract visitors to your website.  Once they are on your website, the objective is for the visitors to click through a call to action, complete a landing page form and receive your offer.  This process is known as lead conversion.  As a rule of thumb, you should set an objective of having 5% of your website visitors convert to leads.  If your conversion ratio is less than 5%, you should take a look at your content offers, calls-to-action and landing pages to make sure that they are matching the buying process of your target market.  Measure your conversion ratio with web analytics and adjust your process accordingly.

Closed-Loop Analytics – Converting Leads to Customers

Your revenue growth process doesn’t end with inbound lead generation – the ultimate goal is to sell your goods and services.  While not available in Google Analytics, inbound marketing software packages like HubSpot allow you to integrate sales data from your CRM system back into the analytic process.  Again, a good benchmark to shoot for is converting 5% of your leads to sales.  If you’re not hitting this benchmark, you once again need to adjust your process to deliver sales-ready leads to your sales force.

In summary, the inbound marketing analytic process is one of continuous improvement.  Companies that do it well produce a large number of sales-ready leads to the sales team which they in turn convert to customers.  It adds some science to the art and provides the iterative process necessary for you to successfully grow your revenue.