Why Track SEO Marketing Metrics?
1. Organic Traffic & Growth
If you’re using any type of marketing channels, you’ll want to track the amount of traffic they’re generating. Traffic metrics to track include visitors, pageviews, and bounce rate. In addition to tracking the amount of traffic your marketing campaigns are generating, it’s also important to track how much that traffic is growing over time. You can track traffic growth across different marketing activities. If you’re using a marketing automation platform, you can track traffic growth with funnel reports. Keep in mind that traffic and growth are two separate metrics. You can have a lot of traffic but a low growth rate. It’s important to track both numbers so you can make adjustments where necessary.
2. Organic Revenue Growth
Investors want to know how your company’s revenue is growing and how much of it is coming from organic, unpaid sources. You’ll want to track the total sales revenue of your business, as well as where that revenue is coming from. If you can see a source of revenue growing organically, that’s a strong indication that your product is solving a genuine customer problem. It also indicates that this source of revenue is less reliant on paid marketing campagins, which can save you a lot of money over time.
3. Paid Traffic ROI
The next marketing metric on the list is the return on investment of paid traffic. If you’re running paid ads, you’ll want to make sure you’re tracking the return on that investment. There are two main metrics to track when it comes to paid traffic – conversion rate and cost per acquisition (CPA). The conversion rate is the % of visitors who complete a desired action (e.g. buy a product, fill out a form, etc.). CPA is the average cost per acquisition. This is the total cost of your ads divided by the number of customers acquired from those ads. These metrics indicate whether or not your ads are effective but also show how reliant you are on paid ads versus organic traffic.
4. Backlinks
Your potential investor will want to see that your content is generating a healthy backlink profile. That’s why it’s important to track the number and quality of backlinks your content is getting. You can track the number of backlinks your content is getting by using a tool like Ahrefs or Moz. You’ll want to make sure your content is getting natural links from high-quality websites, as those are the most effective links for SEO. The more backlinks your content has, the more powerful it is for SEO. An abundance of backlinks is a sign that your content is highly relevant and useful, which is important for SEO.
5. Brand Awareness
Although it’s not an immediate business driver, a potential investor will want to see that your marketing efforts are increasing brand awareness. A strong brand is a significant asset for any business and can help you generate more revenue down the line. There are a few different ways to track brand awareness. You can track social media metrics like impressions, click-through rate, and share of voice. You can also track online mentions, website traffic, and other general website metrics. The main thing to keep in mind when measuring brand awareness is that you’re looking for consistent growth across all key metrics. If you notice a spike in brand awareness followed by a significant drop-off, it might be a sign that your campaign didn’t generate sustained results.
6. Lead Generation ROI
If you’re using content, social media, or paid ads to drive people to a lead generation form, you’ll want to track the percentage of people who complete the form. The metrics you track for new leads will depend on how you’re driving people to the form. If you’re using content to drive people to the form, then you can track things like number of pageviews, average time on the page, and how many people click through to other pages.
If you’re using social media to drive people to the form, you’ll want to track things like number of impressions and click-through rate. If you’re using paid ads to drive people to the form, you’ll want to track things like click-through rate, number of conversions, and conversion rate. Alternatively, you can use lead scoring to evaluate the effectiveness of your lead generation efforts. Lead scoring is the practice of assigning a numerical value to each lead with a corresponding lead score. Lead scoring can help you determine which leads are most likely to become potential customers a.k.a qualified leads, which ones are a long shot, and which ones fall somewhere in the middle.
7. Conversion Rate
This is the percentage of visitors who complete a desired action. Some of the most common actions that investors want to see are email signups, purchases, and online leads. You can track conversion rates across all of your marketing activities. You can track conversions in Google Analytics or with a conversion tracking software like HubSpot. Tracking your conversions gives you valuable insight into your website’s health and reveals areas where you can improve your marketing strategy.
8. Customer Acquisition & Customer Acquisition Cost
9. Monthly Active Users
There are a few different things that investors will want to see when it comes to growth metrics. One of the most important metrics is your monthly active users. This tells your potential investor how many people are engaging with your product on a monthly basis. The best way to track engagement metrics is to use a tool like Google Analytics. You’ll want to track the number of people engaging with your product or service pages. These numbers will indicate whether your marketing efforts are leading to consistent growth. Monthly Active Users is a strong indicator of future and monthly recurring revenue, so it’s important to make sure you’re tracking this metric.
10. Product Usage Metrics
As with the above, investors are interested in knowing how customers are interacting with your product. This data can also help you determine what content you should be creating and where. You’ll want to track how often users are using key features and sections of your product within a given period. From there, you can determine what content you need to prioritize within your strategy to help users become successful faster.
11. Customer Lifetime Value
Conclusion
Investors will want to see key metrics so that they can better understand the state of your company performance. That being said, you don’t want to wait until you have an investor meeting to start looking at these metrics. You need to track the right marketing metrics from the start of your company’s growth phase. If you want to get these reports to investors faster, you’ll want to invest in software that can help you track your web traffic, including customer acquisition and conversion rates, product usage, and marketing spend.
