The How-to on Tracking Website and Blog Leads
It’s absolutely vital for your sales team to reach out to leads in a timely manner. Making contact with leads in the first 24 hours after the visitor-to-lead conversion is the best way to turn those leads into customers. This is one of the main reasons why we urge you to evaluate your leads on a daily basis.
The way marketing and sales work is changing; they are becoming so intertwined, that HubSpot has coined the term “Smarketing” to describe the change. While your sales team will be the ones reaching out to your qualified leads, you still need to track your leads in order to grasp what marketing assets are producing those leads.
Fortunately, HubSpot makes it a breeze for both sales and marketing departments to track lead generation. For marketing purposes, you can check your HubSpot dashboard daily to see where you stand. There are many options for viewing lead generation analytics, and specifically for comparing them in different times frames. This includes:
- This month compared to your current goals
- This month compared to your previous month
- This month compared to three-month average
- This month compared to year-over-year
- This quarter compared to year-over-year
- This quarter compared to last quarter
Note: if you have HubSpot’s Reporting Add-On (an extra $200 per month) you can see the sources where each lead came from automatically on the dashboard. If not, you can go to HubSpot’s Sources page and see what’s driving your lead generation. From the Sources tool, you can see where your lead originated, such as from:
- Organic search (Google, Yahoo, Bing)
- Referrals (Links on other sites)
- Social media (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+)
- Email marketing (Links in email)
- Direct traffic (Manually entered your URL)
- Other campaigns (Other sources that don’t fit into these)
Tracking incoming leads on a daily basis allows you and your marketing team to react to current trends and refine your marketing strategy accordingly.
Tracking All Website Traffic
Is the content you’re creating and publishing online actually being found? To understand this, you need to look at your daily website traffic.
Getting the most traffic to your website is essential for lead generation. For example, if you’re converting at an average 5% conversion rate, that means that, for every 100 visitors, you’re trying to convert five into customers. The more traffic your website produces, the more leads you can expect to convert. Bringing in more qualified traffic to your site is key to procuring the customers you’re looking for.
With HubSpot’s Sources tool, you can select “this month to date” (from the dropdown on the left) and “daily visits from all sources” to see what sources and pieces of content are generating the most traffic to your website.
Below, you can see the Sources Report tool, which gives you a breakdown how many visits came from each source during a particular time period.
- Green is organic traffic
- Yellow is referral traffic
- Teal is social media traffic
- Orange is email marketing traffic
- Blue is direct traffic
- Purple is traffic from other campaigns
Checking these numbers daily gives you insight into why you’re hitting or missing your monthly goals, and increasing website visitors should always be a big part of those goals. Remember, more visitors will eventually lead to more customers if nurtured through the buyer’s journey appropriately.
Tracking Your Blog
It’s important that you are measuring the impact of the blog content you produce on a weekly basis. By doing so, you can refine your plan accordingly and produce more content on the topics that your visitors want to read (and less of what they don’t want). Measuring posts on a daily basis won’t tell you much, because your posts haven’t reached their peak of social media shares or inbound clicks, so instead we recommend checking post analytics weekly.
Although HubSpot counts how many visits each blog post receives, Google Analytics will provide you much greater detail in this regard.
Here are the available blog metrics you’ll want to track in HubSpot:
- Number of blog views that article generated
- How many clicks your CTA received
- What blog post’s are generating leads
HubSpot’s Blog Dashboard allows you to analyze blog performance based on custom date ranges, as opposed to only year-over-year, previous month and three month average ranges. The Dashboard also contains a section that displays the top blog posts that have converted visitors into new contacts. Here, the option is limited. You can either choose to see the top converting posts of all time or last month.
While this information is useful for creating more of the content your beloved buyers want to see, more information is needed to further optimize our blog posts. This is where Google Analytics comes in!
Here’s a breakdown of all the data that Google Analytics can provide you with:
- Page views: the number of times a particular post was viewed by someone. If it was viewed multiple times in a single session, they are all counted.
- Unique page views: only one page view is counted; multiple views of a single page aren’t counted.
- Average time on page: useful for learning the type of content and length of content that’s ideal for your buyer persona.
- Entrances: this number signifies the first page view of a session.
- Bounce rate: the percentage of sessions that were ended without any interaction on your page.
- Exit rate: the percentage of page view sessions that on this page.
- Page value: this only works when you have defined e-commerce and/or business goals configured in Google Analytics. This measures which pages are driving the most revenue.
Source: Bluleadz
