12 Key Inbound Marketing Metrics You Should Already Be Tracking

Inbound marketing being the “in” thing among the current marketing trends, everyone wants to join. Deciding upon the perfect inbound marketing metrics to measure will depend on your company and your individual digital marketing goals.

Its popularity is not only because everyone is doing it, but also because marketers are able to communicate with the audience and have a conversation.

Customers and marketers are able to create long-lasting relationships, a business is able to “breathe life” into the brand since the website and the ads are not just pages, and lastly an organization is able to set itself as a leader in an industry.

Currently, business owners are eager to learn the inbound process from the beginning to the end.

A lot of common questions are asked like how to measure the inbound program once it`s up and running, the perfect or acceptable numbers when measuring inbound program and what tools are used to analyze the data.

There are numerous reasons why analysis should be conducted on an inbound marketing strategy.

At the same time, measuring your return on investment is not difficult as some of the business owners might think.

It majorly relies on having a good plan put in motion, choosing and using the proper points to measure, and afterward assessing your metrics on a continuous, short period basis to identify what is working for your business.

Starting an inbound marketing process and online presence is not an easy venture; one shouldn’t rush in it after just having a clear image of the moving parts.

This is delicate because it involves harmonizing your website, your potential customers, and the search engine. It requires deep planning; an audience for your products or services has to be identified for your page, you need to build trust with for them to purchase your products or services later on.

It requires patience and time to achieve the desired outcome. As we stated earlier you have to set standards based on your business model that works in your best interest.

What Do You Want to Accomplish?

Business owners and marketers shouldn’t rush into this. It is prudent to identify and put down the goals you want to accomplish by implementing the inbound marketing campaign.

Efficiency in planning and laying out goals determines what measures will be used to ensure success.

As much as business owners will be pleased by the fact that their site has had a million views, they will be more thrilled to know that in the previous months before implementing the inbound campaign, they had way fewer visits.

Business owners should identify what they want:

• Is it a larger awareness to the masses about the brand? Awareness of the product offered?

• How to increase traffic on its website?

• Sales increase, or building up a database for its customers?

Increasing customer engagement can be a reason and a need for a business to build loyalty with its customers however, all the above are important goals that drive businesses to build their online presence.

They all are different and vary in metrics and analysis when creating a marketing plan. Once you figure out what you want to achieve by having an online presence, the statistics on what is important comes out clearly.

What are the 12 Inbound marketing metrics you need to keep track of?

Inbound Marketing Metrics #1: Overall Traffic

You have to set goals on the general site traffic you want, for instance if you are currently receiving 500 views and you would like to exceed 2,000 and above a day.

This would be easier for you to measure your success rate and set appropriate objectives on how to achieve them.

Inbound Marketing Metrics #2: Referral Traffic

This comprises of the shares from/on social media platforms, the number of people who are viewing your page via your blogs, and how effective your social engagement with your audience is.

Referral traffic increase helps you to know that your content has a high value, your audience is interested to know your brand better, and that your information is being shared widely.

Referrals to your website give you a great opportunity to capture your audiences’ information and turn the data for a constant conversation.

This helps in growth of the brand and helps the business know its potential clients better.

Inbound Marketing Metrics #3: Email Collection

One of the easiest ways you can measure your social media and blogs is the number of email addresses your system captures when individuals visit your website.

This is also a good forum where you get to interact one on one with your potential customers. This can also act as a database of email addresses which is a very important sales tool.

You can send to and receive email from your audience with their consent and use the medium to send them quality information within your inbound marketing campaign.

Inbound Marketing Metrics #4: E-commerce Sales

It is easy to identify outsiders visiting your website through social media and then monitor and track how they were converted to frequent visitors, and finally becoming your customers.

This process from visitor to customer maybe slow or fast depending on the products or services offered.

Even though that might be the case, this is a great way of determining seasons where customers buy a certain type of product or service.

Inbound Marketing Metrics #5: Increase in Brand Mentions

This is another measuring tool- it determines how well your product or service is doing by the number of mentions across social media platforms.

The measure is in the tracking of brand mentions because the more mentions there are, the more people are aware of the product.

Inbound Marketing Metrics #6: Coupon Redemption

This is a very easy method customer tracking method where you follow up on coupons using numbers.

You can easily identify who redeemed a coupon and which platform was used, then use the information to target them for your marketing campaign.

Inbound Marketing Metrics #7: Growth in ‘Following’

Measuring metrics using ‘following’ is debatable because it is argued that not all ‘following’ are attributed to direct revenue or increase in sales.

Even though this is true, when your following number increases, it can only mean that you are doing something right.

Inbound Marketing Metrics #8: Returning Visitors

If your audience finds something they don’t like or the page doesn’t capture their attention they might never come back.

A returning visitor to your website is valuable because it proves that show you are involving your audience in a deeper engagement, your relationship with your readers has grown and is becoming stronger, and there is a growing interest in your products and services.

Inbound Marketing Metrics #9: Bounce Rate

It is a little complicated, but a very important measure. Bounce back involves identifying who left your page, what page they left it for, and how they entered your website.

If you have a high bounce rate, you might reconsider redesigning to make it more captivating. The opposite means you are doing something right.