Metrics for Return on investment + Return on Engagement.
In the past 3-4 years, marketing has evolved exponentially beyond hits, visitors and referral traffic. (Note, if you don’t know what these terms are, click here to see “guide to website visitor tracking.”). Today, a successful marketer needs to be aware and gather intelligence from multiple business units to truly get the full picture.
Return on Investment (ROI) is permanently engrained in the brains of all marketers and sales mavens. The term Return on Engagement (ROE) surfaced to help measure investment of time and the return from inbound marketing, outbound marketing, lead generation, social media and other online marketing tactics. Both are equally important, and both have a place in a marketing intelligence report to upper management.
KPIs are the Key Performance Indicators that represent your company’s digital footprint & online success.
Below is our TOP TEN list of KPIs we track.
1. Sales Revenue
To determine how effective your inbound marketing campaigns are performing, you must understand how much revenue your inbound marketing campaign has brought in. Gaining access to your sales revenue reports will give you a thorough understanding of what activities are working and see the differences between inbound and outbound marketing & sales.
2. Cost Per Lead
Understanding what your cost is to acquire a customer will give you a true measurement of your online success. Being able to differentiate between your inbound and outbound marketing and being able to determine which ads, emails, marketing automation or PR campaigns led to the lead will give you an informed outlook. When determining the true cost, don’t forget to include relevant costs including technology/software, CRM platforms, advertising, marketing distribution and overhead.
3. Customer Value
Keeping tabs on your customers is a natural part of any good customer retention cycle (and winback program). Managing outreach programs to current customers on a monthly and/or quarterly basis helps measure happiness, solicit satisfaction and find feedback. Plan out your touch points carefully and strategically. In the Buyers-focused sales cycle, building rapport and nurturing relationships is key.
4. Inbound Marketing ROI
Measuring the success of advertising spend against sales will absolutely help you determine if you want to continue said advertising campaign. Return on investment means more than just measuring budgets, it is about determining which marketing functions and activities are working and, with some proper forecasting, should dictate future opportunities.
5. Traffic-to-Lead Ratio
Website traffic is one key factor in measuring differences between organic vs paid traffic, social media driven vs referral traffic, and backlinks vs SEO-based campaigns. By tracking traffic-to-lead ratio, one can see the relationship between a low ratio and missing or bad on-page SEO content or where bad campaigns are leading people to the wrong places. With a good strategist behind you and focus on conversion rate optimization, you can control the situation and CHANGE your website text, layout, UI design, forms, theme, etc.
6. Lead-to-Customer Ratio
Do you know how well your sales team is performing? We as marketers have to find ways to attribute sales success to our campaigns. Measuring qualified vs accepted leads will help track what business a rep would have gotten already (repeat business, walk-in traffic or past referral) versus genuine NEW lead (landing page, social media form conversion, etc.). Real campaigns are measured in real time and have REAL sales measurement tools in process to track and follow. You can go old school with good team communication and an Excel spreadsheet or via daily/weekly production meetings or you can deploy CRM software that all are inputting into the central repository. Interpreting that data – you as a marketing professional have to step up!
7. Landing Page Conversion Rates
As a WordPress maven, we’ve been preaching about utilizing landing pages and A/B testing to determine what content is leading your Calls to action – Your CTAs). It’s one thing to get a beautiful landing page and it’s another to design it to leapfrog ahead of your competitors or to meet the UI tastes & preferences of your intended audience.
Measuring the conversion rate will help you find out what landing pages are successful and which ones are underperforming. Form there, you can do A/B testing to see how changes affect sales. From redesign to copywriting to applying advertising methodologies (celebrity endorsement, testimonials, reviews, awards, etc.), managing is key to improving foot traffic and manipulating your lead ratio.
8. Organic Traffic
Organic traffic is your website’s natural “resting face” in search and how people naturally find you when searching without an actual inbound marketing campaign, pay-per-click ad, referral article, etc. In other words, no SEO-induced or paid online marketing tactical traffic, but just good old fashioned word of mouth or I stumbled on you. Every site wants to achieve this status. How we monitor, manage and maintain this MUST be part of your long-term SEO strategy/PR game.
9. Social Media Traffic (and Conversion Rates)
Having a strategic social media platform is vital in today’s marketing. Every client we consultant, we make sure to educate on the direct relationship with the DNA of our intended customer(s) and matching social media tools that reach those individuals or groups. For the author, Linkedin plus Pulse plus Slideshare have been proven tools. Whereas the average artist or retail outlet, Facebook plus Pinterest plus Instagram plus Twitter have been invaluable tools. The goal is to determine what your Return on Engagement (ROE) is. We do this through tracking referral traffic from social media, tracking social media channel lead conversions and through ASKING customers how they found us! At times there are opportunities to source that referral.
10. Mobile Traffic, Leads, and Conversion Rates
Optimizing your website for mobile is key. In fact, every new website we design, we START with designing in mobile and tablet view and FIGHT focusing just on desktop/laptop perspectives. Nearly 60-70% of foot traffic for most websites are first from a mobile device. Optimizing for this is no longer an option; it’s a priority.
Google Analytics, Statcounter and other website traffic tools all offer mobile vs desktop statistics. Marketing must have the finger on the pulse of tracking bounce rates from mobile devices, conversion rates, traffic per device/browser, errors and dead links, etc. If you know what content isn’t working, you can improve the copy/content and user experience/design, which, with proper SEO and optimization work, will help with future mobile conversions.
