Inbound Marketing Analytics: Improve It TODAY

For 93% of B2B buyers, the buying process begins with a web search. SaaS companies should focus on creating engaging content to end up in web results. But this leads to the importance of optimizing that content to search engines so that people can find it.

These are all aspects of inbound marketing, which is a marketing strategy that seeks to attract customers naturally and build meaningful relationships with them. SaaS businesses should use inbound marketing analytics tools and metrics to evaluate the effectiveness of the inbound marketing strategy and improve marketing performance.

Keep reading to learn more about inbound marketing analytics, as well as dashboards and metrics you can use to improve your inbound marketing.

In a rush? Click here to see top inbound marketing analytics dashboards.

What Is Inbound Marketing Analytics?

Inbound marketing analytics is data that shows you the effectiveness of your inbound marketing strategy. 

Inbound marketing is a strategy that focuses on pulling customers inwards through non-invasive marketing techniques such as SEO and content marketing.

This model is in contrast to outbound marketing, which is an endeavor to attract customers’ interest through more interruptive methods such as print and TV ads, cold calls, and email lists.

Although the ultimate goal of both types of marketing is to convert leads, inbound marketing focuses on building meaningful relationships with customers and offering solutions to problems they’re facing. 

Using marketing analytics tools, you can measure the performance of your activities along the inbound marketing funnel. 

The marketing areas you should be tracking are:

• Blog posts
• SEO
• Paid search
• Social media marketing
• Email marketing
• Website and landing pages
• Lead nurturing and marketing automation 

There are various metrics you can use to measure performance in these strategies. They’re so many that it might be discouraging to use analytics. But using all of these at once won’t be effective; there are some essential dashboards and metrics which I’ll go through below.

Dashboards

In this section, I will go over HockeyStack’s content marketing dashboards that will allow you to understand which content brings the highest revenue and how you can improve your inbound marketing strategy accordingly.

Blog Posts That Drive Revenue Dashboard

Blog posts are one of the most effective ways for SaaS businesses to spread awareness about their product and eventually convert qualified leads.

This dashboard lets you know which blog post brings in the most revenue. With this data, you can study the customer journey backward and find out which customer segment shows the highest interest in a particular post. You can then optimize your content to that customer segment to bring in even more revenue.

Click on the image to see a live demo of the dashboard!

Internal Links’ Signup Influence Dashboard

Internal links are an essential part of your website. They increase the value of your articles and help improve site rankings. They also guide the reader through your site. If you know which pages bring in the most conversions, you can lead the visitor to that site through effective internal linking. 

This dashboard shows you how well your internal linking strategy leads to signups. You can see the number of users who were initially on a page, those who then clicked an internal link, and finally, how many of those who clicked on an internal link signed up.

Click on the image to see a live demo of the dashboard!

Content Lead Quality Dashboard

Anyone who views content on your site is a lead since they’re interested in something that you provide. Although traffic from leads is important, there’s something equally important: the quality of the leads.

After viewing one piece of content, it’s the steps the lead takes afterward that determine the lead’s quality. This dashboard shows the funnel conversion rates along the user journey so you can know who your quality leads are and produce more content that results in conversions.

Click on the image to see a live demo of the dashboard!

Sources Dashboard

Bounce rate is an important indicator of how well you’re attracting the right visitors. A high bounce rate indicates low engagement, which probably came from people wrongly targeted. 

With the Sources Dashboard, you can compare bounce rate data for different sources to understand how they vary among each other. This information can help you direct your marketing strategy towards the most engaging platforms and target the right people.

Click on the image to see a live demo of the dashboard!

Organic Traffic

Organic traffic refers to the visits to your website earned through unpaid search engine results. 

These are the visits from people who naturally found your site by typing keywords on search engines such as Google or Bing. It’s opposed to references when people click on a link to your site or paid traffic when people find your site through paid ads.

Why is Organic Traffic important?

There are many reasons why you should focus on increasing organic traffic:

1. It’s cost-effective

The best thing about organic traffic is that it’s free. Unlike paid advertising that you need to maintain and pay for consistently, if you are successful at driving organic traffic, then the costs of your marketing strategy will be significantly reduced.

2. It comes from real people

Organic visits to your site come from real human beings, while PPC (paid-per-click advertising) has a higher chance of coming from bots and automated machines.

3. It’s long lasting

If you’re successful at establishing search engine visibility, chances are that your site will continue to rank high for a long time until a competitor gets ahead of you. This is in contrast to paid traffic, which is short-lived and only works for the period you pay for it.

4. It’s targeted

Organic traffic is targeted to people interested in your business, which helps you attract the right people.

Social Traffic

Social traffic is from people who reach your site through social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, Pinterest, etc.

For example, if someone clicked on a link on Instagram that led to your site, it’s counted as social traffic.

Why is Social Traffic important?

1. Large Audience

One reason why driving social media traffic is essential is the extensive use of social media today.

In 2022, Facebook is the top social media platform with 2895 million monthly active users, followed by YouTube, with 2291 million monthly active users. YouTube doesn’t offer extensive marketing capabilities, but Facebook ads platform is a great marketing tool for B2B SaaS businesses. Also, Instagram has 1393 million monthly active users and provides a very engaging platform and attractive visual features for marketers.

As these figures continue to increase each year, there is a greater opportunity for marketers to leverage social media for traffic.

2. Repeat Visits Through Referrals

On social media platforms, people constantly share things with each other. Often, these are links to websites that people want to recommend to their friends and family. A person might normally ignore or overlook links on search engine results, but when they get recommendations from trusted ones, they’re more likely to check them out. This gives the page additional visits through referrals.

Lead Conversion

Lead conversion is what you want to achieve with your marketing. It’s the process of converting leads into customers through various marketing strategies. The conversion is marked by an action that the lead performs, which makes the lead a converted lead.

To become a converted lead, the lead should go through some stages:

• Lead: someone who expresses interest in your product
• Marketing-qualified lead (MQL): a lead who shows interest in your product through a specific action – such as by requesting more information – and is therefore more likely to become a customer
• Sales-qualified lead (SQL): a lead who has been qualified by the sales team to move to the sales process
• Customer: An SQL who has made a purchase

Lead conversion is sometimes confused with lead generation, but they’re not the same. Lead conversion comes after lead generation, which is turning visitors into leads.

Why is Lead Conversion important?

Lead conversion is important for the simple reason that if you aren’t converting leads, you aren’t acquiring customers.

You can use various lead conversion metrics to evaluate the effectiveness of marketing and sales practices directed at converting leads. 

Demo Signups

A product demo demonstrates your product’s value to potential customers. It aims to address the problem that the customer wants to resolve through the product.

Product demos are crucial for SaaS because they can greatly influence the potential customer’s final decision. 

Demo signup is when a potential customer signs up for a demo. SaaS businesses with demos offer a demo signup page for leads who are willing to learn more about the product.

Why are Demo Signups important?

A demo is a great way to explain what your product is about. This is especially true for transactional SaaS products offered at high prices and needs more information to grasp fully. A demo provides comprehensive information in a visual format that is deeper and more personalized to the potential customer. If you can get users to sign up for your demo, that’s great because sometimes, even the slightest inconvenience in a signup page can deter people from signing up. 

A demo has a higher potential to be successful if done the right way: If it’s given to a prequalified lead and is aimed to understand and focus on what the person is trying to solve rather than solely demonstrate the functionalities and unique features of the product.

Returning Visitor Rate

Returning visitor rate shows you how many people come back to visit your site multiple times. When you look at the total number of browsers, the ones who have been identified more than once are the returning visitors.

This metric categorizes visitors based on the number of times they returned to your sites, which can be 2-3 times, 4-9 times, or more than 10 times.

A problem with returning visitor rate is that it’s not always accurate. If a visitor deletes cookies or opens your site from another device, the visitor is identified as a new visitor rather than a returning visitor. Also, the status of a returning visitor is held only up to the past 2 years.

Why is Returning Visitor Rate important?

This metric shows marketers the effectiveness of their strategy of building an audience base. A high rate of returning visitors indicates that visitors get value from your site, making them willing to return to it again.

CAC

The amount that costs you to acquire a new customer is the customer acquisition cost (CAC). It is found by dividing the sales and marketing costs over a period by the number of customers acquired over that period.

In general, two main factors go into CAC:  

• Marketing expenses for generating a lead
• The costs that go into converting leads, which are typically the salaries of people in the sales department

Why is CAC important?

CAC is important for any business, but it’s especially crucial for SaaS businesses since they are based on a subscription model. This makes it important to figure out how many months of recurring revenue it will take to cover CAC. 

Since the model of SaaS businesses focuses on the lifetime of the customer, you can realize the full value of this metric only when you consider it with customer lifetime value (LTV). LTV is a measure of the worth of a customer when considered over the entire lifetime.

The LTV: CAC ratio shows the relationship between these metrics. The higher this ratio is, the more profitable a customer is in the long run.

Most Popular Pages

The most popular pages are pages that are most viewed by visitors. Typically, this is the home page, but it can also be other pages, such as one that is promoted through an ad.

Click on the image to see a live demo of this dashboard!

Why is Most Popular Pages important?

Your top pages are usually the ones who bring in the most traffic, even if they’re few in number. Also, they’re the ones that will have a greater impact when you make changes to them. 

If you have content on your site, the top pages might frequently change based on the content that attracts visitors’ interest. This can indicate the type of content you should focus on generating.

Most Exited Pages

Exit pages are the pages that are last viewed by visitors right before they leave the page or their session ends. The most exited pages are those that don’t capture visitors’ interest for very long.

Why is Most Exited Pages important?

If you know what pages visitors leave the most, you can analyze what is causing them to lose interest and optimize the page to keep them longer. You might need to improve the quality of content on the page, insert more internal links, or change the structure and navigation of the page. 

Conclusion

The variety of inbound marketing strategies provides many opportunities for SaaS businesses to increase brand awareness, generate leads and convert them. Like anything in marketing, it’s the data that show the effectiveness of these strategies. You can analyze inbound marketing analytics through the dashboards provided by HockeyStack, as well as the metrics I have listed. These will help you identify what is and isn’t working so that you can improve your marketing tactics.

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