How to Measure the Success of your Business using 6 Lead Generation Metrics

Lead generation metrics are precisely what they claim to be. These metrics can be analyzed to get a measure of how the company in question is performing at the marketplace. It is essential to quantify the right lead generation metrics, to understand the value of the leads generated. All promotions, products, sales strategies, creative assets can be assessed via these metrics to check if they are having the desired impact and performing up to the standards. 

Lead Generation Metrics: 6 Tips to Measure the Success of your Business

CTR is a measure of the clicking performance on any call-to-action tool, in that it shows the percentage of viewers that click on the tool for any given advert or, link, email or promotion. Ideally, any good lead generation campaign should involve multiple call-to-action tools. Thus, at each stage of the campaign, the business should engage in identifying

a) Click-to-action tool

b) Measurement of the CTR 

This lead generation metrics might sound a little complicated for someone just getting started, but an easy way to calculate CTR on any aspect of the campaign can be done using this formula: 

(Total number of clicks/Total number of visitors) * 100

While for search engines the denominator will be a total number of impressions but for the specific campaign example for email campaigns it will be total number of recipients who opened the email. So the denominator will change based on the campaign.

This lead generation metric is the percentage of lead generated by a company that perform a specific action on an ad, email or landing page. The ‘specific action’ can be defined by the company. Examples can be given of – downloading an e-book, making a purchase etc. However, conversion can mean meeting any goal that was set and not just a sale. For a focus on lead generation, the following conversion rates need to be imperatively monitored:

- Visitors-to-lead: It is the number of visitors who convert into becoming verifiable leads

- Leads-to-opportunity: This is the number of leads that are sent to the sales team to facilitate a sale (leads turn into opportunities)

- Opportunity-to-win: This is the number of opportunities that end up with a concluded sale, which can also be termed as the ‘lead conversion rate’
 

The time to conversion lead generation metric is useful for businesses in the sense that they display the amount of time that is required for a visitor to become a verifiable lead. At every stage of the sales or promotion campaign, it is vital to keep a track of the total time to conversion so that one can get a clear picture of the length of the sales cycle. It is fairly easy to track the time to conversion metric by using the formula:

Total time spent by all visitors/Total number of leads

This metric can be used to optimize systems to generate more leads.

ROI is a percentage value or ratio that gives the owners and investors the answer to one of the most pressing questions in the marketplace, i.e. if the return on the business venture is enough to justify the forward moving trajectory. To get a somewhat detailed overview of the ROI from campaign, the calculation must include

Total cost for every stage of campaign and total potential income from each customer (Customer Lifetime Value – CLTV)

 Further details can be met by measuring

- Cost of creating offers and products, supporting content etc

- Total capital spent on traffic through ads, PR, social media etc

- Estimated profit from each lead with a potential to convert

In the modern marketplace, an increasingly large number of businesses are using contemporary tools like paid advertising as part of their efforts to channel greater amounts of traffic into their system. It has been reliably demonstrated by peer-reviewed studies that paid to advertise can help increase brand awareness by at least 80%, if not more. The benefits are equally multi-fold – Google’s indigenous metrics indicate that around 45% small businesses actively invest in paid advertising to grow operations. Again, Google ads has been found to have a reach of a network of more than 2 million websites and applications. In this context, CPC metric is indispensable. CPC is the cost any advertiser must incur for every single click made unto their ad by a user. Keeping a tab on the CPC counter is a good way to determine the best-performing ads for the venture. A lot of traffic for an ad is a good idea until it stops returning profit and that is when the ad becomes a liability that is best done without. The CPC lead generation metrics is helpful in tracking such situations.

Today is a fast-moving, connected world living off developments in multimedia technology. This means that in the marketplace, good content is in heavy demand and content marketing is indeed the founding stones of a ton of businesses these days. However, it has also been strongly asserted in business circles that there exists a positive correlation between time spent by users on a page and the quality of leads. However, problems can be identified if this metric reports a trend of users visiting the page and then exiting it in a very short period it could be logically inferred that it is the poor quality of content that is sending visitors away. This is the bounce rate. Even though video and other multimedia are increasingly taking over the market, content can still be curated to the tastes of audiences visiting a page to provide them the maximum value for their visit. Regularly updating content helps in removing discrepancies, makes it engaging, and keeps visitors coming back to the website.

Conclusion:

There are more metrics that a business may need to follow and the relevance of metrics will depend upon the organization’s maturity and type of business (B2B or B2C). But with these key metrics and a balance score card, the organization can track the business growth and identify the specific areas to focus. Overall it provides a deep insight to track the business growth and identify the next best action. To drive the lead generation process, we offer a complete Omnichannel suite that can be very relevant to improve some of these metrics.