One of the biggest benefits of using HubSpot is the amazing tracking that comes with the software. Just a few years ago, you would send an email out and that's where it ended. You never knew the stats of who was opening that email or clicking on a link. I love drilling down on the details after we send out an email campaign. And I am sure I flippantly throw out the terms we use to measure those stats to clients with no explanation of what they really are or why they are important. Here are just a few of the email and website measurements we use to gauge how successfully an email or web page/website is performing.
Organic Search — This is traffic to your website via a search engine that is NOT a paid ad link. Organic traffic is driven by SEO, so having an Inbound Marketing plan is crucial in order to increase your Organic Search traffic.
Bounce Rate — Bounce rate is the number of visits (people) that stay on only one page of your website. Ideally you want people to dig deeper into your website, so they will submit a form. Bounce rate is a great tool to utilize when comparing page stats. For example, maybe you have a landing page that has a high bounce rate. Try changing it up by adding a form or a home button. If you have a high bounce rate, you'll want to reevaluate that page and look at it from a customer’s point of view. Why are people jumping off that page and not visiting other pages of your site?
Sessions vs. Visit – Okay, this one is a little tricky. HubSpot does a great job of explaining it here. In short, a session is a group of interactions a visitor has with your website over a given amount of time — the timing can be different per source. A visit is a single click onto your website, like when your blog pops up on someone’s Google search and they click on it and then go back to Google to keep looking for an answer.
Paid Search — You know how when you Google something and the results are generated you see a few results at the top with a little "Ad" symbol next to them? Well, those are paid search ads. Companies have paid to have their ads display at the top when designated keywords are searched. The cool thing about paid search ads is you don’t have to pay for them unless they are clicked on. Paid ads are an awesome way to drive traffic to your website.
Email Open Rate — This is the number of people who opened your email divided by the number of people who received your email (take note that bounced emails are subtracted out of the received email number). Basically, it's the percentage of people who opened your email. We like to see open rates of 18% to 25%, depending on the industry. For example, the beauty industry is very saturated with emails, so you would expect to see a lower email open rate with a beauty email campaign than with an agriculture email campaign sent to existing customers.
Email Click-Through Rate — This is the number of people who clicked on a link in your email divided by the number of emails that were delivered. Now this is good stuff. Knowing the percentage of people who clicked on an email link is a great way to track the success of an email campaign. Here's a blog we posted not too long about Industry Specific Marketing Email Statistics.
What I find so awesome about all of this is that we can actually provide hard data to clients showing the progress or successful results of our work. The internet is an ever-changing environment, and understanding your audience's movements within the internet is always going to put you at an advantage when closing a deal.
