By Your website is the home base for everything you do in B2B marketing, so the amount of traffic it receives and what happens once your visitors arrive is critical to marketing success. That's especially true for a B2B technology company where there’s a considerable expectation that you understand modern technology and can deliver the best user experience.
Relequint hosted a webinar alongside client Kinettix called “KPIs for Global IT”. We discussed which website traffic metrics are most important, how to gauge industry benchmarks, and how to effectively use a marketing KPI to meet and exceed larger marketing goals.
Importance of Tracking the Right Website Traffic KPI
Put simply, if you're not tracking, you won't know if your website is underperforming or how making changes impacts the outcome. Each marketing KPI is a mirror to help you identify the effectiveness of your B2B technology strategy and the implementation of your B2B marketing plan.
If there's one thing we learned from our recent sit-down with Kinettix, it's that KPIs tell a story. And we also learned that you can see it actively unfold through the numbers. Reading this properly can help you direct the way that story progresses.
What to Track to Understand Website Traffic
In the webinar, Kinettix established four critical B2B technology KPIs (traffic, leads, revenue, ROI) vital to their inbound marketing success. Here, we will dig deeper and look at the B2B marketing KPIs that specifically paint the picture of how you can improve your traffic performance. Those are:
- Organic/Direct Traffic: How much traffic comes in from organic and direct sources? Organic traffic primarily includes non-paid search and social media. This metric indicates how much genuine awareness and interest you generate with your inbound marketing content.
- Traffic by Source: Further track your traffic sources to measure which sources are delivering the most traffic and highest ROI. This allows you to focus and streamline to get the highest-value traffic from the best sources.
- UX KPIs: These include page load speed, bounce rate, dwell time, number of pages viewed, scroll depth, entry/exit pages, etc. These help you understand how real people experience your website when looked at together.
- Conversion Rate: What percentage of visitors provide contact information, so you can nurture them through email marketing segmentation and automation to turn them from MQL to SQL?
- Number of Qualified Leads Your Website Generates: The number of actual leads matters, as well. Your sales team needs to be able to count on a certain number of leads traveling through the pipeline at a certain rate to plan to receive those leads and to close those deals. This is critical for marketing-sales alignment.
- Unique Visitors: This is the number of people who've visited your site at least once in a set time. This tells you how much new interest you're generating versus continuing to re-engage visitors. While re-engaging is important, if you're getting lots of repeat visitors but few leads from them, then you're churning poor quality traffic. Bottom line: The right people aren't progressing through the B2B Buyer's Journey.
How to Set Benchmarks for Each Marketing KPI for Website Traffic
1. Identify Some of Your Top Competitors in Google
Look at who comes up for the most relevant searches for your company. Make a note of these websites for step two.
2. Test Competitor Websites
Use a website speed testing tool to see how fast your competitors' sites are loading on desktops and mobile devices. Compare this to your site. Some tools will let you run the test from various cities around the world, so if you have global aspirations, you'll want to check this from various countries and continents.
3. Use a SaaS Tool to Compare Sites
Use a tool to compare sites further. These tools tell you things about competitors, like monthly traffic, what their top pages are, top keywords, rich snippet performance. Take a closer look at their top pages to see how they keep people on their page and how they generate leads.
4. Explore Industry Benchmarks
Various B2B technology companies in the website analytics industry regularly publish benchmarks based on data they've collected from their users in the form of benchmark reports. These provide you with some invaluable insights into how your website compares to others. It will help you set SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic) for each marketing KPI.
5. Invest in Automation to Track the Important B2B Technology KPIs
This will allow you to base current goals on past performance, industry benchmarks, and other business goals.
Don't get us wrong. Google Analytics is great! And it's free. Definite bonus there. But there are better automation tools that can gather many data points, compile them, and analyze them. They can deliver more real-time and helpful information, as well.
Marketing analytics automation helps you confidently make decisions to influence traffic performance, and it saves you a lot of time. You can also automate publishing, social media posting, email blasts, and more to increase traffic further. Have you found other benchmarks that has helped you gauge how many readers visit your website? Comment below and let us know!
If you’re looking to track the right KPIs for your website to help improve your traffic performance, sign up to access our webinar, “KPIs for Global IT” below.
