In business, we spend a lot of time talking about ROI (return on investment). It’s not cheap to run a business, and since you spend so much time doling out money, it’s good to know what you’re getting in return. Some expenditures make it difficult to gauge your ROI; advertising, for example. How can you accurately measure the value you’re getting out of a billboard advertisement?
Perhaps this is one of the reasons why inbound marketing has been on the rise. Thanks to the technical nature of inbound marketing, and the fact that it exists almost solely online, we have access to plenty of numbers related to our marketing efforts. But unless you know which numbers are important, and what those numbers mean, you aren’t going to understand how effective your marketing is.
In order to help you figure out, let’s go over four marketing analytics terms you really need to be familiar with.
Unique Monthly Visitors
The amount of traffic your site gets is always going to be important; the higher the traffic is, the more chances you have to generate leads. But which traffic numbers are most critical? Overall traffic should always be on the rise, but pay special attention to unique monthly visitors. If you have many repeat visitors, this isn’t going to show itself in your overall traffic numbers. However, the unique visitor number only counts each person once. And new visitors are a great sign of progress, because that means you’re reaching people you never had access to before.
Keyword Rank
If you know anything about inbound marketing, you know that keywords are a big part of the formula. You’ve got to find keywords that are used most often in searches related to your market/field. But just finding the keywords isn’t enough; you have to use them, and use them often. If you’re utilizing keywords well, then you’ll end up with a great keyword rank. What does this term mean? When people perform searches for those keywords, your rank indicates the priority your content is given in the search results. So if you’re ranked no. 1 (which can be quite difficult), then your content is going to be at the top of the search results.
How do you improve this number? By using your keywords more often, and using them in content that’s informative and valuable.
Lead Conversion Rate
This number relies as much on sales as it does on marketing, because the effectiveness of your sales team plays a big part in your lead conversion rate. The stat is pretty self-explanatory: how many leads do you convert into sales? The average rate is about 2.35 percent, which probably seems very low. If you can push your conversion rate to 4-5 percent, you’re doing a spectacular job. Just don’t expect the rate to get much higher than that; even if you’re the best in the business at conversions, you’re going to max out around 11 percent. That means in the best case scenario, almost 90 percent of your leads will never buy anything.
Referral Traffic
Referrals or referral traffic lets you know when your traffic is coming from another website, and what that website is. Why does this matter to a marketer? Because it shows if your outreach methods are working. If you’re getting noteworthy traffic from your social media sites, that’s an excellent sign. You should be leveraging every tool at your disposal to drive traffic to your site (because again, more traffic means more lead opportunities).
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