How To Tell If Your Inbound Marketing Is On Track

SEO. SMO. SLOMO. KPI. UI. UE.

The topics surrounding these abbreviations can be extremely overwhelming.

Is there anyway to simplify all of this? Yes, there is.

Focus on only these three metrics: visits, leads, and customers.

Besides those three obvious metrics, there are other ways to check the vital signs of your inbound marketing efforts. Read the five ways to gauge your inbound efforts and see if your marketing is on track.

1. Sources Report

Where are your visitors coming from and how often are they converting when they arrive? Which source of traffic has the highest rate of conversion? These numbers will give you an idea of which inbound campaigns are performing and which ones could use some help.

Example: If your visitors are coming in from social media and arriving on your blog, reading a few articles, and then leaving, then perhaps you are not providing enough opportunities for them to find your products or offers. In this case, you should improve your conversions by adding more call to action (CTA)’s and internal links, making it easier for your visitors to find out more about you.

2. Social Channel Lead Generation

When was the last time you generated a lead from Twitter? LinkedIn? Instagram? By this point in the game, you should have a few, key social channels that you post good content to on a regular schedule.

Social media has a 100% higher lead-to-close rate than outbound marketing, so you know the value of being active on your platforms. There is no need to be on every platform in existence, just the ones your buyer personas are on. Evaluate the lead generation for each of your channels, bump the ones that aren’t performing, and redirect your efforts to the ones that are. Realistically, you’re probably not going to land that B2B contract by following teenagers on Instagram, so you should refocus your social efforts to the channel that will. Disclaimer: This is probably true, but there are exceptions. You are most likely not one of the exceptions, so don't count on landing a contract via Snapchat anytime soon.

3. Lead Conversion Rate

So you’ve got leads. That’s great! Lead generation shows that your attraction strategy is working. Now see how many of those leads have converted to customers. This is your Lead Conversion Rate. A high LCR is an indication of high quality leads have been captured. If your leads have a low conversion rate, you may want to reevaluate to try and improve your customer conversion process.

4. Click Rate, Open Rate

Email marketing still has the highest ROI when compared to all other marketing channels, such as paid search, social media, and display advertising. Gauge the success of your email campaigns by reviewing the open and click rates of your recent sends. Are your recipients opening the emails they receive or completely ignoring them? When they open, do they click on your offers? Low open and click rates are an indication that you may need to do some list segmentation or try some new subjects lines to improve these numbers. Bonus Fact: 6 a.m. has the highest CTR of any hour.

5. Returning Traffic

A good ratio of returning to new traffic is a good indication that you have delighted visitors. Your website traffic report should show a reasonable balance between new traffic and returning visitors. A typical ratio of returning to new traffic for B2C companies is 22/78. For B2B the ratio is around 44/66.

If you started with little to no returning traffic, you should see an increase in returning traffic percentage over the course of a few months. Filtering your returning traffic by number of pages viewed will help you segment a list of very “hot” visitors who are more likely to convert. (Disclaimer: Your competitors may also be hiding among this list, so it is important to use good software to filter your contacts accordingly.)

Using these five tests will help you assess your efforts. Talking to an inbound agency can be a great help, too. Most respectable inbound agencies have offers to do a free assessment for you, completely free of charge and commitment. If you’d like to learn more about improving your marketing, you can get more information here.

This post by Josh Harcus was originally published by WeWork on June 1st, 2014.