analyticsAnalytics can be a great way to help you identify those tactics that are creating leads online. Consider the following four main benefits of measuring your inbound marketing.

  1. Identifying what’s working.
  2. Identifying what’s not working.
  3. Identifying ways to improve.
  4. Implementing more of the tactics that work to improve marketing performance.

Regularly measuring and analyzing your marketing takes the guesswork out of what to do next. Rather than making blind decisions about whether to continue with a particular program or focus on one channel for creating leads online more than another, your analytics can give you the insight you need to make that decision intelligently.

Analytics should be reviewed with creating leads online for the following marketing channels:

  • Social Media
  • Email Marketing
  • Lead Nurturing & Marketing Automation
  • Website and Landing Pages
  • Search Engine Optimization
  • Paid Search
  • Business Blogging

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Here are some examples of analytics that should be studied as related to your Website Performance

Unique Visitors

  • Definition: The total number of individual visitors to your site during a specific period of time, not counting repeat visits by the same individual
  • How to Use: Unique visitor data shows whether your content and campaigns are successfully driving visitors to your site. Look for a good upward trend over time, or in conjunction with specific marketing campaigns. If your unique visitor count isn’t rising, you may need to reassess your marketing tactics.

New vs. Repeat Visitors

  • Definition – A comparison of your unique visitors vs. the number of visitors who came back more than once
  • How to Use – The more repeat visitors you have to your site, the more “sticky” it is (i.e. prospects are finding valuable content that keeps them coming back for more). If your repeat visitor rate is only in the single digits, your site might not offer enough valuable information to capitalize on the link or campaign that attracted a new visitor in the first place. Conversely, if your repeat visitor rate is higher than 30%, you’re probably not growing your audience enough to generate new business. A healthy rate of repeat visitors is about 15%.

Traffic Sources

  • Definition – A breakdown of the specific sources of traffic to your website, such as direct, organic, or referral
  • How to Use – Direct traffic comes from people who have typed your website’s URL directly into their browser, visited your web pages via a bookmark, or clicked on an untagged link from an email or document you produced.

Referring URLS

  • Definition – The specific, non-search engine URLs that send traffic directly to your site. They represent the inbound links that are crucial for boosting your site’s search engine rankings
  • How to Use – Track changes in your referring URL list monthly to see if your SEO link-building efforts are paying off. You want to see the list of referring URLs growing steadily over time as you produce more content that other site owners and bloggers deem worthy of sharing with their audience. You also can study your referring URLs to determine which types of sites or bloggers are linking to your site and what type of content they tend to like. All of this information can be fed back into your SEO strategy, helping you to produce more content that is likely to generate inbound links.

Most/Least Popular Pages

  • Definition – A comparison of the pages on your site that receive the most and least traffic
  • How to Use – Studying your most popular pages helps you understand what kind of content visitors and prospects find most interesting. Popular pages also are good places to focus your database building efforts. For instance, you can add an email opt-in box or offer a registration form for a content download on those pages.

Indexed Pages

  • Definition – The number of pages on your site that have received at least one visit from organic search
  • How to Use – This metric tells you how many of your pages are being indexed by search engines and are getting found by users. Know this, and then you can drill down to see which landing pages receive the highest percentage of visits.

Landing Page Conversion Rates

  • Definition – The percentage of visitors to your site who take a desired action, such as purchasing a product or filling out a lead generation form
  • How to Use – By monitoring your conversion rates, you’ll know how well you’ve been capitalizing on the traffic coming to your site. You can monitor several different types of conversion rates,
  • including:
– Visitor-to-Lead Conversion Rate: the percentage of visitors who become leads
– Lead-to-Customer Conversion Rate: the percentage of leads who become customers
– Visitor-to-Customer Conversion Rate: the percentage of visitors who become customers

Tracking each of these conversion rates is like giving your marketing funnel a checkup. You’ll see where you’re doing well — such as converting visitors into leads — and where your funnel may be leaky, such as failing to convert those leads into customers

Bounce Rate

  • Definition – The percentage of new visitors who leave your site almost immediately after arriving, with no other interactions
  • How to Use – A high bounce rate means your pages aren’t compelling or useful to visitors. This could be a reflection of problems with your marketing strategy, such as having inbound links from irrelevant sources or not optimizing landing pages for specific campaigns. A high bounce rate could also indicate problems with your site itself, such as confusing architecture, weak content, or no clear calls-to-action. Bounce rates can vary dramatically by industry and from website to website. So rather than benchmarking yourself against external bounce rate metrics, monitor your bounce rate over time to make sure it’s falling or at least remaining steady.

We will present additional analytics that should be collected and studied in a subsequent blog. These will include how to measure SEO, how to measure paid search, and how to measure Social Media marketing.

 

 

 

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