Inbound Marketing Analytics: Uncover key points in the customer journey and Improve marketing performance

To obtain insights into the performance of your inbound marketing initiatives, analytics is vital. It also eliminates the guesswork of what to do next by providing you with concrete data. So, if you don't measure the performance of your marketing effort, you won't know how well your inbound marketing program is functioning and where you need to make improvements.

Are there any vital inbound marketing KPIs to keep an eye on in your inbound marketing campaigns?

Several of our clients and marketing partners ask us this question. Analytical data is a goldmine. Most marketers find it difficult to keep track of multiple reports and data. This section focuses on the following combinations of reports and metrics. As an Inbound Marketer, you must keep track of these metrics in order to make better data-driven decisions and achieve Inbound goals.

What is Inbound Marketing Analytics?

Inbound Marketing analytics is the discipline of monitoring, managing, and analyzing inbound marketing activities such as social media, emails, events, websites, blogs, and so on.

Why is Marketing Analytics Important?

1. To understand what happened

Organizations can use marketing analytics to gain insights into the performance of prior plans and examine them to understand why results have formed in a certain way. Marketing teams can prevent making similar mistakes in the future by analyzing historical results.

2. To comprehend what is going on

In addition to providing insights into historical activity, marketing analytics can also provide data on the performance of present marketing operations. Real-time marketing effort status can assist marketers in improving and optimizing current initiatives in real time.

3. To be prepared for the future

Businesses may foresee changes in consumer behavior by leveraging marketing analytics' predictive models, such as clustering, regression analysis, and collaborative filtering, according to a new report. When a viewer is most likely to leave a website, for example, they can anticipate which lead is most likely to become a client. This process will be sped up with the development of machine learning and other advanced statistical methods.

4. Optimize for performance

Combine marketing analytics with market research to maximize efforts and streamline expenditures. Market research objectives translated from marketing analytics will enable firms to leverage big data, channelize efforts and streamline expenditures in the proper direction at the appropriate time.

What exactly should you be measuring?

To begin with, the idea of measuring everything may seem difficult, but don't stress about it. Also, don't think that certain things can't be measured because they're intangible. An advantage of digital marketing is the ease with which you can measure just about any technique. Numerous tools, both free and paid, are readily available, and there is no reason not to measure every aspect of your inbound marketing funnel, from top of the funnel activities like SEO and blogging to middle of the funnel activities such as email marketing and lead nurturing, and everything in between.

1. Traffic from organic sources

Everyone who uses inbound marketing wants to grow organic traffic to their website because it's cost-effective and the number one source of quality visitors and leads for their business. People finding your products or services through a search engine is a good sign. In addition, your content marketing efforts should be focused on relevant, powerful keywords in order to keep track of this figure.

• 10 ways to increase blog's organic traffic
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2. Traffic from referral sources

Measuring the amount of traffic you receive from external sites, such as Facebook and Twitter. Start focusing your content marketing efforts on these referrals if they are delivering traffic and conversions to your site.

3. Return on Investment

Analyzing your marketing ROI on a monthly or annual basis with inbound marketing analytics offers you an idea of how productive your efforts are. So, for example, you will know which social media outlets are most effective for you and what type of material is most appropriate for your target demographic. At the same time, you'll be able to map out your strategies and budgets for the months and years ahead.

4. Email open rate

Look at how many emails are opened after a campaign launch or a monthly newsletter. According to HubSpot, an appropriate number of email messages per month is 16-30, with an average open rate ranging from 32.2% to 35.3%, depending on the size of the business.

5. Email click rate

The email's click-through rate lets you know how well it's engaging recipients. In contrast to the click-to-open rate, this metric shows activity from everyone who has received an email in their inbox. It gives you an idea of how much of your audience is interested in your content at any given time, and over the course of time.

This metric can be calculated by some ESPs using unique clicks, but not by all of them. When a subscriber clicks on a campaign for the first time, it's recorded as a unique click. If you click on the link more than once, it hasn't been counted.

Campaign Monitor's annual email marketing benchmarks revealed that the average click-through rate should be approximately 2.6%.

• 101 actionable email marketing tips that boost results

6. Unsubscribe rate

A 2 percent unsubscribe rate is considered normal by Campaign Monitor for all industries because it is so low. There are strategies to keep your leads from unsubscribing from your emails, such as sending appropriate information according to your segmented list and avoiding inundating them with emails.

7. Website bounce rate

The amount of time that a visitor spends on your website tells you a lot about their relationship with it. Technically, a decent bounce rate is between 35% to 51%. If the bounce rate on your pages is minimal, your marketing campaigns and website are doing well. If your bounce rate is too high, you'll have to work on making your pages more engaging so that your visitors stay around for a little longer. Consider whether your landing page's design requires work or whether it already has a clear conversion route.

8. Return on Investment

Analyzing your marketing ROI on a monthly or annual basis with Inbound Marketing Analytics offers you an idea of how productive your efforts are. So, for example, you will know which social media outlets are most effective for you and what type of material is most appropriate for your target demographic. At the same time, you'll be able to map out your strategies and budgets for the months and years ahead.

9. Social audience growth

How many of your site's visitors and conversions come from social media? This indicator will show you how well your brand is engaging with the social audience. If your following is dwindling, it's time to rethink your strategy, your content, or both.

10. Lead conversion rate

What results have you seen from your lead nurturing efforts thus far? Do you have a high rate of closing? This metric can be improved through the evaluation of your sales process or by working with your sales staff to boost your results.

11. Keyword performance

Search engine visibility is the ultimate purpose of keywords. Creating great content to attract readers and slide in keywords your prospects used to locate you online is necessary for this to happen. It's a terrific approach to determine if your efforts are having the desired effect by tracking this.

12. Organic traffic growth rate

51% of all web traffic comes from organic search, and 40% of all revenue comes from organic search. Because of this, search marketing agencies are constantly striving to increase search traffic. Ranking on the first page of a search engine for a phrase will improve organic traffic; ranking in the top three places or the featured snippet for that term will likely result in an exponential traffic rise. However, if your website does not see a significant organic search growth, you will be missing out on significant revenue opportunities.

13. Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)

ROAS, or return on ad spend, is a marketing term used to measure the effectiveness and financial benefit of a digital advertising strategy, campaign, or ad group. Realizing whether or not your return on ad spend is above average, below average or neither is critical. Marketing campaigns can be benchmarked to see how well they're performing, and whether or not your firm can make improvements to its ad efforts. Most businesses strive for a ROAS of 4:1, or $4 in income for every $1 spent on advertising. However, the average ROAS is 2:1, which means that for every $1 spent on advertising, $2 in income is generated.

14. Cost-Per-Acquisition

Cost per acquisition (CPA) is a marketing term that represents the overall cost to acquire a single paying customer for a campaign or marketing channel. Cost per acquisition is an important metric for gauging marketing performance since it allows companies to see if their investment in a certain marketing channel is giving them the best return on their money.

15. Landing page conversion rates

The landing page conversion rate tells you the percentage of visitors who converted after reading your call to action. Keep in mind that this statistic can be influenced by a number of things, including your industry, where your contacts are in their customer journey, and the relevance of the call to action.

16. Percentage of returning visitors

Customers that are loyal to your brand and keep coming back for more are a wonderful accomplishment, which is why you should make sure your inbound marketing efforts are always optimized. Knowing how many users return to your site enables you to better target your marketing efforts.

Once you're familiar with measuring the most critical indicators for your primary marketing channels, it's time to broaden your scope and take a comprehensive look at your marketing performance. Identify which marketing approaches and channels have the greatest influence on your bottom line by comparing the outcomes from each channel to those from the rest. You can determine which of your marketing strategies is generating the most return on investment by keeping track of how much income is generated through each channel. However, this data is only available after you've started collecting and evaluating the metric data provided by your analytics tools, which takes time and effort.