Traffic Attraction Metrics You Should Measure | Inbound Marketing SEO

How many people are you currently attracting to your website, and how many of those people convert into leads?

To get started, HubSpot's Marketing Grader tool is an easy way to check the performance of your website from an inbound perspective. 

While HubSpot's marketing grader is definitely a good place to start, a free automated tool can only tell you so much. You will need to dive deeper into your analytics to get a real sense of how your website and inbound marketing efforts are working.

As you examine the performance of your current website and inbound marketing efforts, you should be paying attention to a number of things. 

So, here are the six baseline traffic attraction and conversion metrics you should measure.

1. How many unique website visitors are you attracting each month?

Unique visitors refer to the number of distinct individuals requesting pages from the website during a period, regardless of how often they visit. While solely focusing on this one metric can be misleading, it is definitely important to understand how many people are coming to your site.

In HubSpot, you can view the sources report and select the time period you'd like to report on.

Alternatively, if you aren't using HubSpot, you can use the Google Analytics traffic report.

2. What's your website's traffic-to-lead conversion rate?

A conversion is essentially when a visitor to your website takes an action that you want them to take. Depending on your business model and the goals of your website, a conversion could be signing up for an email newsletter, creating an account, making a purchase, downloading a whitepaper, or something else entirely.

To calculate your conversion rate, you divide the total number of conversions by the number of visitors to your site. For example, a site with 1000 visitors and ten conversions has a conversion rate of 1%.

In HubSpot, there are a number of places you can check your conversion rate. First of all, your website conversions are reported in aggregate on the HubSpot dashboard. If you want to get a more granular report on which pages are performing best, you can refer to the sources report and/or the landing page analytics dashboard. If you aren't using HubSpot, you can set up conversion tracking in Google Analytics. 

3. What are the sources of your website traffic?

In addition to measuring traffic and conversions, you should also understand the sources of your website traffic and leads. How are people finding you? Is there one channel that is driving the majority of traffic? Does a certain source of traffic convert into customers at a higher rate?

These are the types of insights that a Sources Report will help you uncover.As shown in the example below, sources reports typically break down your traffic into buckets, including: 

• Organic traffic
• Paid traffic
• Referrals
• Social
• Email
• Direct
• Other

Depending on which analytics software you're using, traffic sources may be bucketed slightly differently—but these definitions are fairly common across most tools you'll encounter.

In HubSpot, this functionality is quite literally titled the sources report. In Google Analytics, you can use the Acquisition reporting features to gain similar insights.

4. How many opt-in email subscribers do you have?

As an inbound marketing agency, we've encountered email lists of all shapes and sizes. Some email lists are great. Others are, unfortunately, awful. If one thing's for sure, it's that not all email lists are created equally.

Purchased email lists might have worked for you before, but that stuff won't cut it these days. You need to be focused on building your inbound opt-in email list.Forget about your massive list of junk leads for a moment. How many people do you have on your email list who have truly opted-in?

5. How engaged are your email subscribers?

Even if you have a decent sized opt-in email list, if the subscribers aren't used to hearing from you it can be hard to regain their attention.

To determine the engagement of your email subscribers, you will want to consider the frequency of communications that are sent to the list, the deliverability of those emails, and how many people actually open and click on your call-to-action.

6. How much revenue is being generated from inbound sources?

The ultimate metric to gauge the effectiveness of your inbound marketing strategy is, simply, return on investment. Are you getting more money out of inbound marketing than you are putting in? Many inbound marketing software platforms, including HubSpot, offer CRM integration. With your marketing software linked directly to your CRM, it is possible to measure the impact of each channel, campaign, and piece of content on the bottom line.

That's it! Now you know how many people you are attracting to your content, the conversion rate of traffic into leads, and your ability to nurture those leads into paying customers.

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