Most people come to me with one question on their mind: is my marketing program successful? When determining just how successful a marketing program is, there are a number of factors that may determine how successful it is. For example, not all websites are created with the same purpose in mind. If you aren’t selling something on your site, your lead conversion likely isn’t of much interest to you, if any. But if you’re an e-tail site, then that lead conversion number is of the utmost importance. By using marketing analytics, you can track just how well or poorly your current marketing program is performing.

I’ll briefly go through each of the main areas that can be used to determine just how successful your marketing program is, starting with:

Site Traffic

The first and perhaps most important metric to look at when determining just how successful a site is, is how many visitors you’re having come through. You’ll also want to look at how many visitors:

Obviously, the more visitors that a site has, the more likely you’ll be able to convert visitors into a lead. But as a business owner, you want to look at what exactly is causing the traffic, whether it be an increase or decrease. Keep in mind that there are also three different types of “traffic” that a site gets:

Total traffic: The total number of visitors that come to a website

Unique traffic: The number of unique visitors that come to a site. This may perhaps be the most important as it indicates how well a website is attracting new people.

Repeat traffic: The number of visitors who view your site regularly

Direct traffic: This statistic refers to visits from people who type the URL of your website directly into the search bar. This will help a business try to determine brand loyalists, or how many people are finding their business through a news article, pamphlet, or word-of-mouth marketing which provided their web address

Ultimately your goal as a business is to have a good ratio of both unique and repeat visitors. Too many repeat visitors means that the site isn’t growing, but too few repeat visitors means that perhaps the business isn’t satisfying its visitors’ needs and that change is required.

Traffic to Lead Conversion

Let’s move right on to the next step, which is all about turning those visitors into leads. You need to be looking at how many of the visitors that are coming through to your site Inbound Marketing Agency - Marketing Analytics: Is My Current Marketing Program Successful?are then becoming “leads”. Having someone become a “lead” means that they’re more committed to your site, your brand and/or your company than just your average visitor. These are the people who you have the greatest potential to reach out to and sell to.

Closed-Loop Analytics

The only way to continue to be in the business you’re in is to turn those leads into customers, and this is perhaps the most focused upon metric of them all as a result. If you have the right analytical tools, you will then be able to measure exactly what proportion of your leads become customers, and from what sources online (i.e. through Google, a PPC advert, a referral, etc.). Once you have that information, you can then perform what is referred to as “closed-loop analytics”.

Closed-loop analytics sets out to look at each marketing channel you have, and to then measure how successful each channel is. It will look at your visitor to lead conversion rate, as well as the lead to customer conversion rate to help businesses determine:

  1. What works with their marketing plan and what doesn’t, and
  2. To determine how much it costs to acquire a customer from the very beginning of the buying process to the end

The importance of keeping metrics isn’t just all about seeing how well your marketing program is doing. It’s also important to see how different trends in the market may be affecting your own company. One marketing method that you used last month may not work very well the next. You’ll also surely see a trend in sales in varying months (i.e. you may have higher sales in May than December). The goal is for these metrics to give you a holistic view of your marketing campaign and help you continually tweak and refine it. Take a look at our free Ebook “Website Redesign 101” for ideas on how you can change up your site and marketing, or let IMPACT set up your free trial with HubSpot so you can utilize their Website Grader to help further fine-tune your site.

Key Takeaways:

The marketing success of your site may vary based on the purpose of the site itself, but in general your site’s success can be defined in three different steps:

  • Traffic
  • Visitor-to-lead ratios
  • Lead-to-customer ratios

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