One of the great advantages of an inbound marketing program is that you are able to accurately track your success over time with actual data and statistics - no more guesswork and/or relying on frequency and impression estimates. With so much information available though, it can be easy to lose track of what marketing goals you are actually focusing on. That’s why it’s important to have key performance indicators, or KPI’s, for each marketing goal that a monthly inbound marketing report can show. Examples include: 

• Landing page conversion rate to track success of content development
• Organic traffic to your website to track success of SEO
• Sales revenues to track success of marketing qualified leads  

Making a Monthly Report

Depending on what inbound marketing platform you have in place, all the data should be accessible there. Oftentimes however, it can be confusing for the client to look into the platform themselves to see what is working and what isn’t. Because of this, it can be helpful to organize this data in a spreadsheet that is not only easy for the client to understand, but also can show month over month success of your marketing campaigns in one easy-to-read document. Depending on your specific marketing goals, some good KPI’s to include in a monthly inbound marketing report would be:

• Website Traffic – Where is your traffic coming from? Sources include organic, direct, referrals, social media, email marketing, and paid search. Learning where most people are coming from can allow you to put more effort behind that source.
• Blog Metrics – How successful is your content? Are people actually clicking on and reading it? Knowing how many blog views a specific blog has can help you determine what other blog topics may be successful depending on the keywords people are searching for.
• Email Metrics – Are your emails being opened? Are people clicking through to your site? Learn what works and if you need to further segment people you are emailing. This can also be applied to automatic workflows – are people unsubscribing because they’re getting too many emails? If so, you know what you need to fix.
• Conversion Rates – Is your number of new contacts growing? Having a database that you can reach out to in order to eventually convert them into customers is a huge benefit of inbound marketing. However, you need to keep the community growing by creating new relevant content. If your contacts are growing then you know your content is being well received.

These are just a few examples of what metrics an inbound marketing KPI report should include. You can get as granular as tracking when people opened emails, or you can take a birds-eye view and look at the performance of marketing campaigns as a whole. Regardless of which route you take, developing a monthly report benefits both you and the client.