Learn essential marketing KPIs to track, improve, and optimize your inbound marketing efforts. Understand website performance, content marketing, email, social media, and revenue metrics to ensure your money is making money.
When it comes to inbound marketing, you can't improve what you don't measure. But with countless metrics available, all with their own seemingly endless list of acronyms and complicated terminology, how do you know which ones truly matter for your business? Let's break down the essential KPIs that will help you track, improve, and optimize your inbound marketing efforts.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are your marketing dashboard's vital signs. They tell you whether your strategies are working, where you're excelling, and where you need to adjust course. For inbound marketing, these metrics help you understand how well you're attracting, engaging, and converting your target audience.
Whether you’re an online business or just have an online presence, digital marketing is vital for any business from your sold trader builder to your dog walkers to your financial advisors. Your website can be a simple business card, your social channels can be a store for your reviews but if you’re not measuring what’s happening online, you’re missing some vital information.
The great thing about measuring website performance is it’s free. You can use tools like Google Analytics or Microsoft Clarity to get free information about what’s happening on your website. You don’t need to be an IT genius to use it, an hour or two with some YouTube videos should be enough to get you going.
NB: If you’re measuring year on year (YoY), make sure to annotate any anomalies like one off events or large promotions that could impact traffic volumes
NB: If you’re using Google Analytics 4 (GA4), bounce rate has been superseded by engagement rate which aims to use a wider array of data to give a more accurate picture of how well your website traffic is responding to your content
NB: PageSpeed Insights and Google Search Console (Core Web Vitals report) can give you a quick way of assessing your page and site performance. Both tools are free and Google has a library of information on how to understand these metrics.
In this instance, content can apply to lots of different channels from email to SEO to social. If you’re spending time and money on creating content, you need to know how it’s performing otherwise you won’t know how to improve upon it,
NB: Attribution modelling here means making sure all channels get the credit they deserve. If a website visitor makes a purchase after coming directly to your website, did they first visit via a paid ad? This can be monitored in most analytics platforms.
Some channels, like SEO and social media, can run with minimal spend, especially when you’re just starting out. Some channels like PPC or email, need a budget to get your message in front of your audience. These are the basic metrics you need to consider if you’re using email marketing:
Social media is one of the few channels we’re as likely to use as recreationally as well as professionally. But when it comes to tracking KPIs for marketing, you need to make sure you’re looking at more than just followers.
Whilst each channel has its own set of metrics and KPIs, it all comes down to spend - how much are you spending to get that customer? How much money is that customer worth to you? And was it worth it?
In an ideal world, we’d all see all our metrics climb indefinitely but in reality, that’s not the case. All businesses have slumps, economies go through rough patches and even the best laid plans can go awry sometimes. So long as your data is tracking properly and so long as you can read that data and learn from it, obstacles can always be overcome.
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Remember that while all these metrics are important, not every KPI will be equally relevant to your business. Start by focusing on the metrics that directly align with your business goals. As you become more comfortable with tracking and analyzing these metrics, you can expand your measurement framework.
The key is to maintain consistent monitoring and take action based on the data you collect. Use these insights to continuously refine your inbound marketing strategy and improve your results over time.