Measure Your Online Marketing Success for Small Business

To know if an inbound marketing campaign is effective, a business needs to closely monitor its web analytics. A recurring part of successful online marketing, web analytics confirms whether or not a company’s marketing strategies yield results, such as bringing in more leads or customers. Seeing results, in turn, justifies the investment of time and money in online marketing and reveals aspects that need improvement, both of which may drive business growth.

Site Traffic


One of the most important metrics of online marketing is site traffic. How many visitors did each marketing technique, such as blogging, social media interactions, and search engine optimization, draw? The more visitors a business’s online marketing campaign draws, the more opportunities there are to convert those visitors into leads and eventually customers. Business owners should, however, examine carefully the reasons behind an increase in site traffic. Website traffic can refer to three things: total, unique, and repeat site traffic.

Total site traffic is the total number of visits to a website and is the sum of unique and repeat visitors. Total site traffic reflects the overall interest a company website generates. Repeat site traffic, a component of total traffic, is the number of people who visit a site twice or more. Repeat traffic implies regular visitors’ ongoing engagement with the website and thus a website’s stickiness.


Unique site traffic is the number of unique visitors to a website and reflects how well a site is attracting new people to its content. It is important for a business to maintain a healthy ratio of new and repeat visitors. If too many visitors are repeat visitors, a business's reach may not be growing. This is especially true for businesses that sell one-time products or services. While engaging existing visitors may strengthen a business’s online brand and enlarge its supporter communities, acquiring new visitors is key to increasing or maintaining business revenue. There is no fixed ratio for success—a business can determine the proportion of new website visitors that best supports its business growth.

Referring sources are another factor to examine. Just looking at the total number of website visitors does not tell a business owner where the traffic is coming from. To understand which part of its inbound marketing strategy is effectively driving traffic, a business needs to know which proportion of website traffic can be attributed to certain channels. Did the business get a new link from a big website? Is traffic from SEO efforts increasing? Other categories such as email marketing, social media, and paid search should also be examined.


If some sources are not generating website traffic, a business should either work to optimize that channel's ability to send referral traffic or decide whether further investment is worthwhile.


Page popularity is the third element of website traffic analysis. Besides sources of traffic, a business can also break down website traffic by the number of visits individual pages receive. Pages that draw the most visitors contain the most popular content on the website. Knowing what people like to view on a company's site helps a business decide what types of content to keep producing and what to reduce. A page with high page popularity that is often found through search engines may indicate that it is well-optimized for search engines through on-page SEO or that it is targeting strong traffic-driving keywords.

Keywords are the fourth way of categorizing website traffic. What terms or phrases being used on search engines like Google and Bing send the largest number of company website visitors? Are these phrases optimized on the company website and do they match the keywords with which the company wants to be identified? If misalignments exist—when a company does not want to be identified with terms that draw those website visitors—it should start optimizing for keywords that help build its online brand. On the other hand, if a company already ranks well for certain keyword phrases that are related to its business value, it should leverage these “lowhanging- fruit” terms to draw more site traffic. A business can do this by creating content around those terms and thus further optimizing its search rankings for these keywords.

Traffic-to-Lead Conversion

The next step in the sales cycle is to cultivate website visitors into leads, which makes lead conversion another important component to analyze. A business should measure the proportion of visitors that become leads—that is, lead conversion rate. While website visits mainly reflect industry interest, traffic-to-lead conversion reflects prospects’ deeper commitment with a company. In terms of achieving business objectives, conversion rate is hence a more important metric of business success. A channel that generates less traffic but yields a higher lead conversion rate is considered a source that yields qualified traffic, or traffic that draws highquality prospects who are more likely to become leads.


Besides measuring the aggregate lead conversion rate of the website, a business can follow methods outlined in the previous section to measure conversion rates of specific referring sources, pages on the website, and optimized keywords. It should then summarize the kinds of content that yield high conversion rates and continue investing in them.



Closed-Loop Analytics

Customer acquisition is an incredibly important aspect of web analytics. A company can measure what proportion of its leads become customers and from what online sources. With this information, a business can conduct closed-loop analyses to examine the closing rates of individual marketing channels. That is, closed-loop analytics utilizes visit-to-lead and lead-tocustomer conversion rates to help a business understand the cost of customer acquisition from beginning to end for each marketing channel. For some companies, most sales and “closing calls” may take place offline. Even offline-sales-oriented companies, however, can use loop analytics to gain insight into the return on investment of a lead source, whether it’s from an online or offline channel.

Other Metrics


Using the metrics above, a business can monitor its marketing performance. A company looking to improve its marketing effectiveness can use free tools to understand what online tactics it is not yet leveraging that could boost online visibility, site traffic, or lead conversion rate. For example, Website Grader, a free tool developed by HubSpot, helps identify a company website’s missing elements that are critical to getting found online. Specifically, the tool provides companies with a Website Grade. This percentile score not only gives a business a comprehensive analysis of its performance relative to that of its competitors but also makes specific recommendations for improvement to help the business reach online marketing success.

Other metrics, such as direct traffic, should be measured as well. Direct traffic refers to visits from people who directly type a URL into the search bar. These visitors don't have to be existing customers. They may be people who already know the website from memory or perhaps have found the URL in a newspaper article or pamphlet. As a result, direct traffic can reflect word-of-mouth popularity of a company brand on and off the web. A business that measures every technique it implements for each step in its sales cycle will obtain a holistic understanding of its online marketing performance. This information helps a company make more informed decisions that can eventually drive growth and overall success.