Organic marketing is one of the most effective ways to market your website as a long term investment. With that being said, you want to be able to track how effective your efforts really are. So, what are the right metrics to track to showcase a campaign is successful?
Tracking the right analytics will help strengthen the marketing campaign as well as show off the work. Here are some top metrics you should be paying attention to:
Visitor Duration
In order to understand how people are engaging with your content, you need to know how long they are spending on your website. Make it a point to optimize each landing page and blog post with a call to action, so users are staying engaged with your content.
You wrote a great blog, now what? If you’ve already optimized each page with a call to action, but leads aren’t increasing, make sure your calls to action are relevant and worth taking for the user. Really understand your audience and what they would expect to do next.
Landing Page Traffic from Organic Search
Measuring landing page traffic, that is sourced from organic search, allows you to understand the top pages searchers are landing on when they search for a relevant query. You can look at this and know that the top landing pages by clicks are the top ranking pages of your site. You will be able to tell if the ranking pages are relevant to the query by digging into their individual bounce rates and session durations. If bounce rates are high and duration is low, you may want to think about re-optimizing the page with a better call to action or different keywords.
Returning Visitors
It is just as important to measure returning visitors as it is for new visitors. By having a steady growth in returning visits, it shows that your content is giving your followers something worth coming back for again and again. This is also prime data to understand if your leads are being nurtured with the right content or not.
Total Bounce Rate
When someone bounces off your website in under 3 seconds, it’s a good chance they didn’t find what they were looking for. You have about 3-5 seconds to capture your audience and your overall bounce rate will indicate if your content is relevant to their searches. Each industry is going to have different bounce rate averages, so look up the industry standard to know if your bounce is above average.
Social Shares
With organic marketing, a heavy focus is put into the creation of quality content with the goal of people sharing your content for more exposure. Keep track of which social channels are producing the most shares of your content. By understanding this source, you can spend more time engaging with your audience on that platform with more chances that the audience will grow and convert into leads. This is also helps build stronger social signals which builds organic rankings with Google.
Total Leads by Source
Tracking leads is one of the most important metrics to have in place in order to know if your efforts are meeting your end goal of growing your business. Track leads from organic search, social media, referrals, and email marketing to really dial in where visitors are converting from the most. If you’re putting less effort into email marketing, but your conversion rate is higher from this source, try putting more effort into it and measure the results.
Lead Close Rate
You know how many total leads your organic marketing is producing, but how many are actually converting? The lead close rate will reiterate the value of what you are offering to potential customers. It also indicates trust. If your lead close rate is below average, it can indicate that your website is not producing qualified leads. This means you need to invest more time in understanding your ideal customer and making sure your pitch is a good fit for that customer.
Conclusion
To prove your organic marketing efforts are producing a return on investment, you need to monitor the right metrics. The above suggestions are only a handful of what we would normally suggest, but it is a good start to really understand how well your campaign is performing. Organic marketing is an investment and should continue to show steady growth with time if you continually put effort put into it. If steady growth isn’t happening, you may need to develop a new organic website and marketing strategy.
