Matthew Santos
“LEADS! LEADS! LEADS! GET ME MORE LEADS!” – said every CEO ever.
To someone who’s only goal is to drive the company up and to the right, the amount of leads is likely the most important metric. Sorry to break it to you, but there are a lot more metrics that can be analyzed to assess the true success of a company.
Marketers are each aware of the 3 essential metrics that they should always be reporting on:
- Leads
- Sales Revenue
- Cost Per Acquisition
No one wants to be a part of a marketing campaign that is losing money for the company. Track the right marketing KPI’s, and you will be able to make confident adjustments to your strategies and budget allocations.
Without the right KPI’s, you may lead your company astray.
Begin Tracking These KPI Metrics Today
1. Sales Revenue
First, ask yourself this question, “How much revenue has your marketing campaign brought to your company?” Fully understanding your revenue is crucial to knowing how effective your marketing strategies may be. No company wants to spend money on something that isn’t generating anything in return.
To begin determining your revenue you will first have to define the difference between inbound and outbound marketing.
Inbound marketing action items include:
- Blogging
- Pay Per Click (PPC)
- Social Media Engagement
- Developing Quality Content
- Infographics
Outbound marketing action items include:
- Running Television Ads
- Advertising
- Direct Mail
One critical element in this process is capturing sales data directly from your CRM and closed loop reporting. You can then calculate your sales revenue from inbound marketing by using this simple formula:
(Total sales for the year) – (Total revenue from customers acquired through inbound marketing efforts)
2. Cost Per Lead
Calculating your customer acquisition cost will require you to look at both inbound and outbound marketing efforts. How much does it cost you to acquire a customer through inbound, as opposed to outbound?
When calculating CAC for inbound marketing, include:
- Technology and Software
- Manpower (Technical & Creative)
- Overhead
When calculating CAC for outbound marketing, include:
- Marketing Distribution
- Advertising
- Manpower (Technical & Creative)
- Overhead
Once you have accomplished calculating the costs related to your inbound and outbound marketing strategies, you can now begin to account for new sales, and allocate more accurate budgets to each campaign. If your company is taking advantage of one marketing strategy over another, you can break-out that strategy further by the campaign type and finally understand how successful and profitable that specific strategy is.
3. Traffic: Lead
What is your traffic to lead ratio?
In order to find this out, you must make Google Analytics your next best friend.
Fully comprehending your website’s traffic will take your marketing strategies to the next level. The first step to this is understanding where your traffic is coming from. Traffic can arrive to your site from Organic, Direct, Social Media, and Referrals. Pointing out the weakest link early can save your company an endless amount of money.
Audit your traffic. Ask yourself questions such as:
- Does my traffic follow a trend?
- Is my traffic continually increasing or decreasing?
You should also set a goal for each avenue to reach each month.
Lastly, ensure that your visitor to lead conversion rate stays between 2-4%.
4. Landing Page Conversion Rates
How well does your content convert? The most basic way to tell is through your landing pages. Track how many people are visiting the page, then cross reference that number with the amount of people that are filling out the form on that page or taking your specified calls to action.
One reason that people may not be converting as expected can be related to your content. Are you creating engaging content that can convert visitors into leads?
A great way to improve the results of your landing pages is by implementing an A/B Test strategy. This will give you a clear idea of what messages and content work best for your audience.
5. Organic Presence
How relevant are you organically?
The traffic that your site is generating on a daily basis can be directly attributed to your organic presence. In this day and age, you must have an effective search engine optimization strategy.
Here are some great metrics to keep in mind when analyzing your Organic Traffic:
- Percentage of traffic received from branded keywords
- Percentage of traffic received from unbranded keywords
- Number of customer conversions assisted by organic search
- Number of lead conversions assisted by organic search
Those are four key metrics that can help your company gain a much clearer understanding of your brand awareness, effectiveness of content marketing, and the overall impact of your SEO strategy.
6. Mobile
The amount of traffic, leads and customers being produced by mobile devices in 2015 must never, ever be ignored. Smartphones and tablets are taking our marketing frontier by storm, and we all need to hop on the wave.
Is your website properly mobile optimized?
Here are three simple metrics to tell if your currently gaining traffic and leads through mobile:
- Number of lead conversions from any mobile device
- Mobile Bounce Rate
- Conversion rates from mobile optimized landing pages
These metrics not only focus on how many visitors are converting through mobile, it also helps you visualize how effective your mobile presence is.
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