Analyzing Types of Inbound Marketing

Today we’re talking about the Analyzing Inbound Marketing course presented by Marshall Sponder and put on by Hubspot‘s Inbound Marketing University. We’ll start out by discussing four different types of traffic, and then I’ll share with you four ways that Sponder suggests to analyze your inbound marketing efforts.

Direct Traffic

This type of traffic represents mostly those coming back to your site who have already been there. They get there by typing in your URL to their web browsers, or clicking on your page that they’ve previously bookmarked.

Referral Traffic

This traffic is from people clicking a link from another site that connects them to your site. Keep in mind that this excludes Search Engines, so rather it would be a link from a blog, for example.

Social Media Traffic

Though Sponder gives Social Media traffic its own genre, I would put it as a subgroup of Referral traffic. This traffic comes from social networks such as blogs, a photo sharing site like Flickr, message boards, Twitter, Facebook, etc. Generally this traffic is very targeted to a specific piece of content, and doesn’t immediately convert.

Search Traffic

This traffic is from Search Engines, whether from paid (PPC–Pay Per Click or CPC–Cost Per Click) results, or organic (non-paid) results. On a corporate site, about 50%-70% of the traffic results from search.

1. Determine valuable traffic that you’re not aware of.

You can do this by looking at site analytics to find traffic you didn’t know about. Also look for unusual patterns in your analytics. If you look further down the list you can find potential traffic to build relationships with (for instance, via Twitter or Facebook). You can also create a custom segment for social media traffic (in Google Analytics at least). This will help you determine where exactly your traffic is coming from.

2. Learn to take action from traffic you do have.

Take note of your landing pages–look at your paid vs. organic keywords and consider whether or not the right keywords are driving traffic to your site. The trick is finding the right keywords.

3. Set up better tracking by knowing what to ask for.

Keep in mind that certain types of traffic are harder to track than others, for example: flash-rich media doesn’t generate referral traffic and won’t show up in most analytics without additional work.

4. Use social media to take action and increase quality traffic, revenue, and leads.

Identify those major players in your community or within the community you connect with. Find the influential top blogs and/or bloggers and connect with them if possible.

Ok so the key takeaways are:

• Different types of traffic have different value for your site.
• Look for unusual traffic coming to your site in referral logs and segment your traffic by type.
• Make good decisions of your traffic based of thresholds and goals.
• Certain kinds of site traffic need to be tracked in a deliberate way.
• Use social media to find influentials and engage with them.

There you have it! Now go analyze and make your inbound marketing better!

Update: I’m now Hubspot Certified! Thanks to everybody for following my little series based on the Hubspot IMU courses!