How often do you check the analytics data for your SaaS lead generation campaigns? Weekly? More often? Less?
Checking your metrics can turn your lead generation strategy from good to great. It’s the difference between repeating the same, well-trodden path because ‘that’s what worked last time’ and breaking new ground because ‘that’s what didn’t work last time, so here’s what we can do to make it better’.
SaaS Marketers who check their metrics 3 times per week are 22% more likely to achieve positive ROI (Hubspot, State of Inbound Report, 2015). Checking regularly will keep you up-to-date with how your content is performing, and alert you to any anomalies, enabling you to fix problems as they arise.
Today I’m showing you five key metrics you should be measuring, what it tells you about the success of your lead generation activity, and how that insight can improve your campaign.
1) Page Visits
Quite simply, this tells you how many people are visiting an individual page on your SaaS product's marketing website. This allows you to analyse the effectiveness of your content promotion strategy in attracting visitors to your website.
Let’s say you’ve produced a new whitepaper that you’re offering from a landing page, which you are promoting through a series of five blog posts you've then shared on social media.
Assuming that you promote all five blog posts in the same way, you would expect a comparable number of visits for each one in the first few days after publication. But if you see that four of your posts are getting 500+ visits, while one is only getting 50, you can review that post to see how you can improve it. Would a different title make it more engaging and relevant, driving more clicks, for example?
The number of page visits gives you a starting point from which to dive deeper into your analytics, and see what percentage of those visitors convert into leads.
2) Bounce Rate
Your bounce rate shows the percentage of visitors to a page who leave after only viewing that single page. A high bounce rate generally indicates that you’re attracting the wrong kind of visitors to your website.
For example, if you’re promoting a landing page in your social media adverts, and those adverts are seeing a good click through rate, a high bounce rate indicates that your landing page doesn’t match up with the expectations of your visitors.
Are your social media adverts overpromising, or could you promote a more relevant page instead? Answering these questions will help you to achieve a higher ROI from your social media advertising spend.
Learn more: Bounce Rate Demystified
3) CTA Click Throughs
Analysing the click through rate as a percentage of visitors who viewed your CTA is the way to gauge the attractiveness of your content offer to your website visitors. You will read many suggested benchmarks for a good click through rate on a call to action, but in reality these won’t be so useful for you. A better point of comparison will be to look at how this varies week to week, or month to month.
Additionally, comparing the same CTA on multiple pages will help you understand what is contributing to its success. Does the CTA tie in with your blog post and offer the visitor added value if they click? Would changing the text in your CTA make it more relevant to the visitor reading that specific blog post?
Essentially, a higher click through rate means your CTA is relevant, and engaging your visitors, as it is enticing more visitors to view your landing page.
4) Landing Page Conversions
If a visitor is clicking on your CTA but not converting on your landing page, this tells you that something is wrong with that page. Your CTA did the hard work in getting a visitor to click through, but something put them off from filling in the form and converting into a lead.
Are there lots of distractions on your landing page that take the focus away from your content offer? Is the form too long in relation to the value of your content offer?
Optimising your landing pages is a great way to boost your conversion rate and generate more leads.
Learn more: 17 Ways to Optimise Your SaaS Landing Pages
5) Conversion Assists
The Conversion Assist report in Hubspot is a great tool to measure the success of your lead generation campaign. It shows the pages on your website that visitors viewed directly before they converted into leads or customers, and helps you identify the most influential pages on your SaaS product's marketing website.
From this, you can learn a lot about why those pages are effective and apply those insights to improving poor-performing pages.
Leverage Insights to Improve Lead Generation
Any successful SaaS lead generation campaign should be going through a continual process of analysis, review and revision to optimise it for success.
While any of the above metrics may point to things you could change in order to improve your software lead generation campaign, don’t change too many things at once. Using A/B testing will help you make and measure one change at a time, to give a clear indication of how each change affects your landing page conversion rate, and the number of leads you generate.
Download the eGuide below to learn about generating more SaaS leads.
