Whether you’ve been using inbound marketing for a while, or you’ve recently decided to start, there is one thing that can make or break your online success:
Analytics.
One of the biggest advantages to marketing online is the wealth of analytical data available, and knowing how to interpret and use this information can have a major impact on your campaign’s success.
Why are analytics so important to inbound marketing?
Consider all of the time and effort you’ve put into your inbound marketing campaign. What kinds of results are you seeing, and how do they measure up to your goals and expectations?
When you don’t analyze your inbound marketing results, you have no way of knowing whether your budget is being well spent. But with analytics, you can determine exactly what you’re paying for and make informed decisions based on that information.
What metrics should you be analyzing?
There are numerous metrics that you should pay attention to in order to determine how well your inbound marketing campaign is performing.
Here are a few that we suggest:
Traffic
Traffic is one of the most important metrics to consider when you analyze the success of your inbound marketing campaign.
Looking at your traffic numbers tells you where your customers are coming from, which helps you to better understand the behavior of your target audience.
You can see how much of your traffic comes from organic search, referrals, AdWords campaigns, and other sources.
By analyzing your traffic sources, you will be able to tell which channels to put more of your budget into and what channels aren’t working for your business.
Time on page
With the use of Google Analytics, you’ll be able to see how much time a visitor spent on your page.
This is important information for many reasons, but in the case of inbound marketing, it helps you to understand how content on your site is performing.
Chances are, a visitor isn’t going to stay on your site for long if the content isn’t high quality, or isn’t what they’re looking for, but they will stay on your site longer if the content is great.
That being said, bounce rate isn’t always the best indicator of how effective a page is because a visitor to your site might find the answer that they were looking for quickly, which would show the bounce rate to be higher, and the time on page as lower.
ROI
You can find your company’s ROI based on your company’s conversions, since ROI is the comparison or how much money you make to how much money you invest.
Based on your conversions, and studying where they come from, you can tweak how much you spend on each inbound marketing technique in order to spend the most in the areas where you generate the most conversions.
If you find that your Facebook Ads aren’t doing well for your content, but you are spending hundreds of dollars a month, your ROI can help you see that you need to cut back on Facebook ads and increase how much you spend on another technique that works better.
Ready to start looking into your website’s analytics?
We have the knowledge and skills to help you and your business understand the metrics that indicate your inbound marketing campaign’s success.
Contact us today for a free quote!