Tracking inbound marketing success can be incredibly challenging.

For one, inbound marketing is a broad concept and doesn’t have a singular goal. For example, your company may be more interested in simply increasing site traffic.

In this article, we identify 5 metrics you can use to measure the success of your inbound marketing efforts depending on your goals.

Use the information to reduce the time and energy you spend analyzing information and get straight to the metrics that are crucial to judging inbound success.

1. Social Media Engagement

Nearly all businesses (90%) use social media as a tool for inbound marketing, and over 40% of them say it’s their most successful strategy.

To measure the success of your inbound efforts from social media, focus on your engagement. The number of shares and comments on your posts, for example, indicate your ability to connect with your audience.

Understanding your social media engagement also can help you identify:

  • The best platforms to reach your audience
  • What type of content to create
  • When and how often you should post to social media

With this data, you can refine your efforts to achieve targeted results, such as directing audiences to specific landing pages.

2. Email Engage

Email is an essential step in the inbound process, allowing you to build relationships and guide customers toward conversions. Email marketing is a crucial way to access your customers directly.

Ideally, your email list consists of people who are familiar with your brand. Tracking your email opens and clicks gives insight about the sort of content interests this group.

With this insight, you can identify which stage particular leads are in the funnel and better cater your engagements with them to guide them toward the next step of the customer journey.

3. Website Traffic

Inbound marketing is an umbrella term that encompasses a variety of marketing activities which place a high priority on customer experience.

Your website is the foundation of all your inbound efforts, and following its metrics should take high priority.

According to the Visual Objects study, 77% use website traffic metrics to measure the results of their inbound marketing.

When reviewing your website metrics, look out the following:

  • Increase of organic traffic
  • Time spent on page
  • Reader engagement

Tracking these numbers provides insights on how much traffic your campaigns are generating, where traffic is coming from, and how well certain web pages are performing.

Use this data to tweak your inbound efforts to emphasize the referral channels that drive the most relevant and valuable web traffic.

4. Conversion Rate

Of course, understanding how well your inbound efforts convert users to leads, and leads to customers, is crucial to determining the overall success of an inbound campaign.

Inbound marketing measures two types of conversions:

  1. Converting visitors to leads. Leads are most measured as email subscribers, but also can represent the number of social media followers or landing page visits. Tracking the total number of visitors who convert to leads sheds light on how well your inbound efforts engage target audiences.
  2. Converting leads to paying customers: Understanding the revenue earned from inbound efforts is the final step toward understanding the success of your inbound marketing strategy.

It takes time to build successful inbound marketing results, though, so begin tracking immediately but expect to wait about 6 – 9 months to see the full results.

Measuring Your Inbound Marketing Strategy

There are an overwhelming number of metrics available to brands that wish to measure their inbound marketing results.

The metrics that are most-essential to gauging your success include social, email, and website engagement, plus conversions and revenue.

With this data, you can confidently assess the impact and success of your inbound campaign and are well-prepared for future inbound efforts.