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Here are three growth metrics your business must track during 2014. These growth metrics are from the world of inbound marketing, not “dry” core metrics such as yearly revenue. These babies are born and raised in the online arena, determining the faith of your business’s online assets and presence. Each and every one of them is a remarkable measurement of opportunities and threats on your business… so let’s get going.
Most executives in medium-large companies tend to neglect the little details, counting on their employees to keep track of unexpected opportunities.
Referral traffic is a metric that documents visitors that arrived to your website via external references. Sometimes it’s a blog post talking about your product, sometimes it’s someone talking about you in a forum.
Unfortunately, most executives settle for keeping track of their overall traffic – a big chunk of numbers containing their paid, organic and social traffic.
By far, my opinion is that referral traffic is the most important way to spot new opportunities.
A couple of years ago, I was the co-founder of a popular app review website. We were so busy and overwhelmed with app review requests, that we neglected analyzing our analytics on a daily basis. So after a few months, on a bright shiny weekend, I took a look at our referral traffic, and I was blown away.
It seems that there were a lot of app users talking about us in forums, but not just regular forums. In the official Apple, Android and especially Microsoft forums. They linked to our tutorials in a natural manner, recommended our content and sent more and more traffic our way.
Since our business model at the time was banner ads, they actually served as our little automatic salesperson.
If we hadn’t paid a visit to our “referral traffic” metric, we were not to find out they existed. But we eventually did, and boy did it pay off!
Another untapped gold-mine is traffic from social channels. It’s not enough to keep track of your overall growth, but to know which social network is where your potential clients are hanging out, talking about you and sending you more of their friends as potential clients.
From my experience with marketing startups, if you’re a B2C company then Facebook and Twitter are the networks where you should be rocking. Hire a social media manager just for the purpose of maintaining your presence in those networks, as well as run Twitter Ads and Facebook PPC to gain more exposure.
If you’re a B2B company, then you should most likely focus on LinkedIn. Participate in active groups to build high authority within your local LinkedIn community. Share a lot of interesting information as it will float on top of your connection’s news feed.
Also, take advantage of the new LinkedIn Showcase page that allows you show your products in a whole new light.
This metric is super-important because you might be spending thousands of marketing dollars on Facebook campaigns for instance, not knowing that they make no affect at all.
On the other hand, you might suddenly discover that Pinterest is organically sending you hundreds of unique visits per day… so wouldn’t you aim all your guns to there and take advantage of that opportunity?
This is the meeting point of sales opportunities, competition and Google penalties. Taking a close look on who is linking to you on a daily basis is important to learn of new websites and communities that are talking about your company…
But that’s not the critical part for your business.
Most of you already know how important links are for Google rankings, as well as how easy it is for a competitor to demolish them.
Imagine you’re an online business depending on organic traffic for 60% or even 80% of your sales. Did it ever come to mind that a competitor could ruin your entire business with the click of a button? That’s right, it’s THAT EASY and scary.
You see, purchasing cheap service providers to build thousands of links to one’s website is very doable – and you must be monitoring your link profile if you want to defend yourself.
In 2014 we’re going to be flooded with opportunities, threats and competitors doing nasty stuff to overcome our success. Your job is to supervise, or have someone supervise for you, and monitor traffic sources and new links being passively built to your site.
Yoav Vilner founded and manages Ranky – a growth hacking firm for startups. His past includes running a popular app review magazine and marketing a few known Apps. Yoav could also be found on Twitter.
Learn more inbound marketing opportunities with the free Salesforce e-book below.
