Invest in the Right Tools to Track the Metrics That Matter - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #68
In my last post, I shared a few of the metrics I track each week to assess the performance of my social media programs. In this week’s post, I focus on the tools I use to track results. Because I’m a metrics-aholic, I have racked up a rather expensive habit over the years. But, I have found the insight these products provide is well worth the investment.
Here are a just a few of the products I use to track social media and traditional marketing program results:
Website Traffic: Google Analytics helps me track web analytics basics. And, it costs nothing!
Top Referrers: Once again, Google Analytics has my vote for the best info at the best price.
Unsolicited Inbound Leads: I use a combination of salesforce.com and Eloqua to track inbound leads. Eloqua, while one of the most expensive tools in my tool chest, actually gives me details on a one-off basis so can monitor the click stream of a user from our blog to our web to a lead form. And, it helps me automate lead processing which can come in handy when you have a viral marketing success. I have been able to identify enough leads that came from our blog and converted to closed deals to more than justify it’s expense (including the salary of my full-time blogger).
Blog Rankings: Technorati posts blog rankings and authority ratings. Once again, the price is right: Free.
Conversions from Blog to Website: Google Analytics shows me the conversion rate from our blog to our website.
RSS Subscriptions: If you use Feedburner for RSS you can easily get this data for free.
Inbound Links to Website and Blog and Link Value: I use a wonderful SAAS service from Hub Spot to provide this data and more. And, it’s not really that expensive.
Google Page One Listings and Weighted SEO Exposure: This is a tricky area because web traffic data can often lie. But I’ve found another somewhat expensive offering that gives me a good idea of our company’s weighted search engine exposure –both paid and organic– on the keywords that matter. The service is called CIRadar. Compete.com can also give you an idea of your web site traffic trends compared to the competition provided you have enough volume to show up on their radar.
I’m also intrigued by the possibilities of other tools that help measure share of voice and analyze the value of coverage. Products like Meltwater and Factiva. Have any experience with these products? Are they worth the price? Would love to hear from readers about their value for the small and medium size business B2B marketer.
February 11th, 2008 at 9:44 pm
Pam -
Thanks for the link and the mention of HubSpot!
I know you guys have lots of tools there (as a self-described metrics-a-holic) and are somewhat new to HubSpot, but I wanted your readers to know that HubSpot has a ton more functionality than just tracking links - it includes SEO, marketing analytics, lead intelligence, landing pages and the price is really cheap too, as you mention. Though we prefer the word “affordable”.
Thanks again!
February 12th, 2008 at 12:30 pm
What a useful post. Thanks!
Can you talk a bit about how you track and attribute leads from your blog? I know this is a topic of great interest for marketers — people are constantly asking me how you determine the ROI from social media efforts in the B2B world.
In your last post, you talked about conversions from blog to the corporate web site. Do you mean that you track the blog ROI similarly to search engine keyword ad placements?
Thanks!
- Steve
February 14th, 2008 at 4:28 pm
Steve - we use Eloqua to track the click stream of visitors from our blog to our website to our lead forms. I covered this extensively in my post on Viral Video. It’s really cool to be able to see how the blog is driving buyers to your website. In fact, we just closed a rather large 6 figure deal from one of the early blog readers. However, I have not cracked the code on tracking blog visits as closely as Search Engine PPC ads. We can track trending data on those leads, but for blog visits, I mostly rely on one-off click stream data. It takes a bit of digging, but when it comes to justifying the expense of a blog, it really helps.