Lead Generation Metrics You Should Be Aware Of

An effective lead generation strategy operates on a foundation of data, not guesswork. You need to have the right information about your business to develop well-informed decisions that increase your chances of success.

Using the right key metrics allow you to focus on objectives that will have the biggest impact on what matters most in your business. They serve as a guide to help you decide what to prioritize and where to allocate your time, energy, and resources.

Metrics reflect and support where you want to go while giving you a clear understanding of where you are at any given time.

Monitoring and analyzing the “right” metrics is a crucial step in your lead generation strategy – or any business strategy for that matter. You need to know what metrics to take into account to ensure that you’re not wasting resources on areas with little significance to your bottom line.

Here’s a great video on identifying key metrics from Eric Beer to get started:

Quick Takeaways:

• Deciding on what metrics to measure how your lead generation is performing is crucial to overall marketing efforts

• Creating systems and noting patterns will contribute to the understanding of your key metrics

• All metric analysis starts by generating the right leads for your business

What to Measure

Identifying the best elements to focus on allows you to make the most of your finances, manpower, and time without spreading these finite resources too thin.

When coming up with your own metrics, the following questions about your company must be addressed:

• What have the results been?

• Where are the results headed/going?

• What needs to be improved?

• Have you reached your target? If so, when? If not, what must be done to achieve it?

Once you’ve identified your metrics, it’s important to monitor your data and to track your numbers consistently. You’ll be using this data to populate your systems and other analytics software used for measuring performance. These figures will influence what your next steps will be, how you’ll drive improvement, and what to do differently to correct any missteps.

For best results, keep it simple. Metrics should be straightforward and easy to understand. Everyone involved in the organization should have a solid grasp of which metrics to track.

Source: Basis Technologies

All of this must be clearly communicated to every member of the team, and each employee must know how they can influence it. They should also know what steps to take in order to achieve them, and what level of performance is expected from them based on these metrics.

Here’s a list of some suggestions for metrics to analyze your lead generation strategy:

Website Traffic

One of the first things to be on the lookout for is the traffic on your website. Not just the quantity of it (how many people are clicking), but the quality of it (their age, gender, overall demography).

Reaching a large audience is great, but understanding the specific audience you’re dealing with can help you personalize content and suggestions. This leads to increased rapport and trust between your prospects and your brand.

Here’s some flash micro-metrics on measuring your website traffic:

Click-Through Rate: 

Click-Through Rate (CTR) is a metric that measures the overall click performance of your Call To Action (CTA). CTR can be used to measure exactly how effective your banner ad, email blast, or website is at actually making a user look for more information.

Demography:

Demography shows you exactly who is clicking through your content. Key demographics include age, gender, and income. Using sites like Google Analytics can give you more insight on if your content is tailored enough to your target demographic.

Lead Conversion Rate

Revechat.com defines lead conversion rate as –

“It is the percentage of people who come to your site and actually convert. Conversion rate tells whether you are efficiently generating new leads with your website.”

In other words, your conversion rate will show if you are successfully (or unsuccessfully) convincing prospects to contact you. The higher your conversion rate, the more people you’re convincing. The lower your conversion rate, the better your competitors are doing.

Improving your lead generation can be as simple as experimenting with different CTAs, changing up how your advertisements look, or posting different kinds of content to your website blog.

Content Marketing Performance

Source: Entrepreneur

Another key metric is being aware of how your content creation efforts are driving traffic and sales. The whole point of regular article publishing, email marketing, and social media management is to increase awareness and trust in prospects and clients.

By maintaining these three practices you are keeping your advertising dollars down and organic engagement numbers up. Let’s talk about how:

Blog writing: 

Your blog is the keystone of your website traffic. Writing perfect blog posts and publishing regularly on a schedule is how you attract new eyes to your website, and in turn your product or service.

You know this, but when was the last time you actually checked up on your articles’ metrics? By using Google Analytics or SEMrush, you can check on your lead generation rates, conversion rates, and more.

Another easy metric that falls under your content category is time on page. 

Monica Carol of Team Bonding NYC says:

“There’s a strong correlation between how much time users spend on the page and the quality of the lead.”

If your content is quality, users are more likely to stick around and read it, increasing the average time on page per user. With quality content comes quality leads!

Email marketing:

Good SEO practices aren’t the only way you’ve been sharing your content though. Through sites like Mailchimp and Constant Contact you’ve been growing your email lists and staying in front of your customers’ eyes.

Much like other SEO tools, successful email marketing services offer excellent metrics like open rates, conversion rates, and forwarding rates (not to mention what times your emails are the most successful).

By experimenting with different formats and timed releases, you can find what’s drawing the most leads and conversions through your email marketing efforts.

Social media marketing:

Social media marketing metrics are a little different than the last two. While success is defined by lead generation and conversions, social media is less instantaneous. Being plugged into your community is important, but sometimes there aren’t actual numbers (ROI) to prove it.

This isn’t to say you can’t measure your own version of success. Depending on the platform you’re using, things like follower count, post engagements (likes, comments, shares), and general opinion of your presence are a couple of ways to determine your success in social media.

Wrap up

Metrics for your lead generation efforts aren’t always easy to identify, but this list is a great place to start! What’s important to remember is you have to be able to piece small metrics into a larger picture. Lead generation comes with critical thinking and data analysis.

So use your noggin’ and be ready to switch it up when things aren’t going your way the first try. Happy generating!

Do you want to use some of the marketing strategies seen here on MIG’s site but need some help or advice? Marketing Insider Group has a team of 35+ experienced writers ready to produce content for YOUR business. Check out our weekly blog content service or schedule a free consultation.