If you want your company to thrive in the modern era of internet marketing, you must identify key metrics and parameters relevant to your goals. They can play a vital role in your success as they offer a comprehensive view of the customer journey.
A lead generation campaign helps you to acquire new clients or customers. Leads are individuals who express interest in your services or products but haven’t made a purchase yet. You need to find methods to grow leads that work best for your company. Tracking the metrics is the best way to do this. They will help you to see where you are succeeding and where you need to make improvements.
Identifying the right metrics
Every business has its own target customers, goals, and processes. You can’t apply a one size fits all rule for KPIs. Effective lead generation starts with defining your ideal prospects and the results you want to achieve with your lead gen campaigns.
Your goals: By identifying your goals from the beginning, you have realistic expectations and can come up with solid strategies to grow leads. If you break down your objectives into short and long-term goals, you can measure your progress more effectively.
Your target audience: Your ideal clients are anyone who is interested in your products or services. You need to know what industry or domain the client is in and what the right channels are to engage with them.
Building a profile of them will include many details such as demographics, location, budget, etc. Taking a look at your existing client base can give you some idea of what your ideal client will look like. If you’re in e-commerce, looking at the target market your competitors focus on can also help you to define your audience.
Consistent measurement: Whether it is content marketing, SEO keywords, or paid media ads you need to ensure you are consistent in the way you measure the results of your lead gen campaigns across all leads and channels. For example, if your goal is to get more visitors to your website, you must measure this consistently across different time periods.
It is also important to accurately measure revenue, expenses etc. for gauging the performance of lead generation campaigns. Using apps like receipt scanners or expenses trackers can eliminate human error from the measurement process. For instance if you use the best receipt scanner app, with optical character recognition, duplicate detection etc. you can manage finances in a paperless way.
If you have a month-to-date (MTD) goal you can see how far you have come in your lead generation goals. This can help you to identify trends and make some real-time modifications to your strategies if necessary.
Tracking leads through the entire funnel: Full-funnel visibility is one of the best ways to grow leads and close more deals quickly. This is because you have in-depth knowledge about your prospects and their behavior. You start by dividing your sales funnel into awareness, interest, desire, and conversion. This keeps your lead generation metrics organized and ensures you aren’t overlooking any important KPIs. You can track metrics at every stage of the customer journey.
Performance metrics
When lead quality is low, a sales team can waste hours trying to convert people who aren’t that interested. How do you determine the quality of your leads? If you are generating them through your website, checking website analytics can give you on-site metrics, such as traffic sources and conversion rates.
High session duration, for instance, indicates that your content strategy is helping you to grow leads by attracting the right audience. A high bounce rate indicates the opposite and shows room for improvement.
1. Qualified leads
A lead generation KPI should focus on increasing the number of qualified leads you generate every month.
Marketing qualified leads (MQLs): A marketing qualified lead (MQL) is a lead that responds to a marketing message but hasn’t yet entered the sales funnel. The lead may have downloaded an ebook or repeatedly visited a product page.
This is a fundamental lead generation metric that indicates an effective lead generation campaign. When your marketing team can increase MQLs, it speeds up the sales process. The sales team can send problem-solving content to qualified leads and convert them faster.
Sales qualified leads (SQLs): These are customers who have taken actions that show their interest in becoming paying customers.
Product qualified leads (PQLs): These customers have used your products and are interested in becoming paying customers.
2. Conversion rates
Conversion rate is important when assessing lead generation metrics. This is the rate at which a lead moves from one step of the funnel to the next (i.e. from lead to customer).
You can segment conversion rates by individual ads, marketing channels, keywords, or sources. You can track your leads and the resulting number of sales. For example, if you have 20 sales a month and 100 leads, your conversion rate would be 20%.
The conversion rate for landing pages should be at least 10%. If it’s lower than this your landing pages need improving. You can improve lead generation KPI by optimizing your landing pages. There are various other ways to improve your conversion rates such as improving your email campaigns, using appealing CTAs, adding multimedia content, and focusing on user-generated content (UGC) for an e-commerce site.
3. Average revenue per customer (ARPC)
This refers to the average revenue a customer generates in a month or a year. ARPC = (Total revenue) / Total Customers. This metric will differ depending on customer type. Knowing this metric will help with adding products, bundles, and cross-selling or upselling. It also allows for scalable pricing for large customers.
4. Customer lifetime value (CLV)
Customer lifetime value (CLV) gives you insights into the success of your overall marketing efforts. It represents the total amount of money a customer can be expected to spend on your products or services. It directly reflects the loyalty of customers to your business.
The metric reflects facets of your marketing, customer service, etc. To calculate CLV you need to take into account the average purchase size of each customer, the number of purchases they make in a year, and the average profit margins.
Financial metrics
1. Return on investment (ROI)
Most marketers regard ROI as the most critical of all lead generation metrics. This is the metric that shows whether a lead generation campaign was worth the investment. ROI measures the return on an investment relative to its cost. How much money do you generate for each dollar you spend on a lead generation campaign?
For example, three dollars in sales for every dollar you spend on marketing is a 3:1 ratio of revenue to cost. If you spend more money on a lead gen campaign than you get money in return, your methods aren’t working and you need to revise them.
2. Cost per acquisition (CPA)
This is one of the key lead generation metrics for determining revenue generation efforts. It can help you to judge the effectiveness of your marketing budget over time. You calculate CPA by dividing all the costs spent on acquiring more customers by the number of customers you acquire over the period in which you spend the money.
If you spend $1000 to acquire 100 new customers, your CPA would be $10. You spend $10 to acquire each new customer. Effective lead generation results in a low CPA. Combining CPA with metrics like customer lifetime value (CLV) can give you valuable insights into the profitability of a specific campaign or ecommerce channel.
3. Cost per click, lead, or action
Cost per click (CPC): This is the price you have to pay each time a click happens on a paid search ad (also known as PPC). CTRs are key indicators of the success of a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign. A high CTR shows that you are targeting the right people and they are benefiting from your online advertising. Achieving high CTAs is the first step toward acquiring leads.
Cost per lead (CPL): This is another pricing model for online advertising. It is what you pay for the sign-up of a consumer.
Cost per action (CPA): PPC and CPC are both forms of CPA online advertising but this metric includes clicking on a link AND completing an action.
Channel metrics
It is important to know which channels offer the highest conversion rates. Channels may include organic content, social media, email, and paid marketing. You could be wasting time by focusing on too many channels simultaneously. Focusing on what’s working can cut your marketing budget and offer better lead generation opportunities.
By analyzing lead generation KPI data, you can identify which channel is most successful when doing internet marketing to attract quality leads. Perhaps email marketing and organic traffic generate most of your leads. You need to focus on them if you want to bring in the most revenue.
Make sure you properly track and analyze your lead generation metrics. You can build customized dashboards for each channel by following dashboard examples and reporting templates.
1. Organic traffic
Writing good quality content is one of the most effective ways to generate leads. Brand awareness metrics, engagement metrics, and SEO metrics are all relevant when it comes to determining the effectiveness of content marketing.
Google Analytics will show you details such as the number of people who visit your web pages, how many times they view a page, and much more. How many times people click links in your website content and how many times they comment on posts indicates their level of engagement.
You can review your search engine rankings in the Google Search Console. Using the right SEO strategies can help you to rank higher. This will send more website traffic your way and give you more opportunities to convert leads.
2. Social media engagement
Social media marketing is a vital part of your lead generation strategies. Most social media platforms allow tracking and make it easy for you to get the metrics you need. You need to consider the number of followers you have on different platforms and how engaged they are by how much they interact with your content.
It is no use spending time on channels your target audience doesn’t use. Metrics can help you determine factors such as customer conversions and the percentage of web traffic associated with your social media efforts.
3. Email marketing
When it comes to internet marketing, email marketing is still effective. You can have different goals for different email marketing campaigns. One of them can be to generate more leads. Email marketers track various metrics such as open rates, conversion rates, list growth rate, and forwarding rate. These all indicate the effectiveness of email lead generation campaigns.
4. Live chat metrics
Live Chat is another way to boost lead generation results. It’s the easiest way to start a one-on-one conversation with a lead. By being able to converse with customers one on one in real time, you can generate more leads and drive sales. A chatbot can shorten the sales process by giving customers prompt answers and personalized messages throughout the customer journey.
5. Paid channel metrics
Running campaigns across paid channels can help to attract relevant traffic. Social media channels such as Twitter and Facebook offer paid ads that work on a PPC model. Using paid options can help you to reach more people and generate more leads.
6. Public relations channels
Public relations tactics that could help you to generate more qualified leads include sharing media on social media platforms, participating in events, and submitting content to magazines or newspapers.
Conclusion
Even if you have effective lead generation campaigns that generate revenue, you should still measure the process and optimize it in any way you can. It can take months to optimize your lead generation strategies. In the early stages, you will need to test out a whole lot of different options. Once you have the right strategies in place, your effective lead generation efforts can help you to develop a sustainable stream of revenue.