I have a confession to share with you. And, to most readers of The B2B Lead, this will come as no surprise. I am a metric-aholic! My professional life is ruled by metrics. Metrics help me plan my day. They buy my credibility and expedite decision-making. They inspire my competitive spirit and drive me to produce more. They help me justify the purchase of $30,000 worth of t-shirts without a song and dance. Best of all, they empower me to utter the dreaded “No” when asked to use resources unwisely.

So, when it comes to B2B marketing techniques, I rarely invest in programs that do not result in a demonstrated return. Leigh Anne recently posted that she struggled with social media and its effect on lead generation and asked the question “Is social media like traditional PR? You have to do it but there is no way to measure results?”

Well, Leigh Anne, I’m happy to tell you that you can track and measure the results of social media. My post on viral video marketing provides a real world case study of those metrics in action. But the post did not include all of the metrics I track. Nor did it include the tools I use to track these results, some of which may break the average startup budget. In this week’s post, I’ll share a few metrics for determining if your Web Site, blog and social media marketing techniques are working for you.

Here are a just a few of the metrics I track weekly:

Website Traffic: Ensure unique visitor trending is “up and to the right.”

Top Referrers: Monitor the sites that are contributing the most traffic to my Website. Hopefully, your blog is in the top 5.

Unsolicited Inbound Leads: Provided you use Salesforce.com, track the source of all inbound leads using Salesforce.com web-to-lead tracking codes. This will give you insight into your campaign results. Track all leads without a campaign separately and monitor the trend. You can attribute growth in these leads to a combination of PR and social media.

Blog Rankings: Monitor your Technorati ranking and authority rating. This will enable you to monitor your position in the blogosphere.

Conversions from Blog to Website: Is your blog converting readers to your Website? This is critical. If you are providing valuable, relevant, and actionable content on your blog, you should see a high rate of conversion to your website. If you are tracking web-based lead growth, you should be able to make some correlation between an increase in blog conversions and inbound leads.

RSS Subscriptions: Monitor your Feedburner stats to see how many people are signing up to receive your RSS feeds. Once again, make sure that number is growing and experiment with promoting your feed to fuel growth.

Inbound Links to Website and Blog and Link Value: Social media is a wonderful tool for search engine optimization (SEO). And, when it comes to SEO, there is nothing better than a large number of high value optimized inbound links. So make sure you are tracking an increase in inbound links that use the proper anchor text.

Google Page One Listings and Weighted SEO Exposure: Sadly, page one search engine listings don’t just happen with a call to Google. Monitor and measure performance of target keywords and your exposure for both search engine marketing (SEM) and SEO.

That’s probably enough to get started. In my next post on The B2B Lead, I’ll share insight on a few of the tools I use to track these metrics and assess the value of NetQoS search engine marketing and new media programs.