October 23, 2020
The primary objective of online marketing has always been lead generation. But how do you determine whether your website is optimised enough for capturing leads online? Tracking the right lead generation KPIs for your B2B business will lead you to your answers.
Given the fact that prospects now spend more time online, most B2B businesses have made the digital shift for online lead generation. Even then, in the process of lead generation, one can always bring a prospect to the website, or a landing page, but the real challenge is keeping them engaged enough for you to convert them into leads.
A KPI or a key performance indicator is a quantifiable measure of a company’s success in direct relation to their goals. Tracking the right KPIs not only allows you to understand where exactly you’re going right or wrong but also allows you to understand why you’re not getting the results you’re aiming for.
Five Lead Generation KPIs that you need to track
1. Average session duration
The average session duration is the amount of time a website visitor spends on a page or the website. A longer duration indicates that your website visitor is interested and engaged with the information or the content you’re providing. A shorter duration, on the other hand, is indicative of visitors diverting from your page or your website.
Here’s what you can do to increase the average session duration on your website
The aim of your website should be to increase the average session duration. This can be done through engagement. Posting content with more visuals earns 94% more engagement than content without visuals.
Through strategic and tailored content marketing you can target and reach out to a particular audience. High-quality content like case studies, blog articles, white papers that engage your audience and pique their interest in your business, can also help in increasing the average session duration.
Another way to increase average session duration and engagement on your website is through pop-ups, CTA buttons, or live chat. CTA buttons are tools that persuade your audience to carry out a certain action. This can work as a hook on your website and increase the average session duration time.
Proactive engagement on the website can be used to engage with visitors and provide them with relevant information that they are looking for.
Another lead generation KPI that will indicate whether or not your website is optimised for lead generation, is your websites bounce rate.
2. Bounce Rate
A bounce is a single-page session on your site. In google analytics, the bounce is calculated when a user opens a single page on your site and then exits without triggering any other requests to the Analytics server during that session.
Bounce rate is the measurement of how many people visited your website and then navigated away from it rather than continuing to visit other pages.
A study on bounce rate benchmark says that a B2B website will have a bounce rate of approximately 25-55%. For industry-specific bounce rate benchmarks, take a look at this study.
What causes a high bounce rate?
A high bounce rate occurs due to a number of reasons. Perhaps a website visitor couldn’t find the information they were looking for on your website, or your website lacks the right hooks to engage visitors. Or maybe a prospect found the solution they were looking for much faster, on your competitor’s website.
Website visitors are time poor and are often used to finding answers at the tip of their fingers. The longer it takes for your website to load, the less patient your visitor becomes, leading to an increase in your bounce rate.
Consider the volume of people who use their smartphones to browse for something, if your website is not optimised and mobile-friendly, this undoubtedly affects your conversion rate, but it also affects your search rankings.
Lead generation statistics show that only 50% of business landing pages are optimized for mobile phones. Take a look at industry-specific data about how many people access websites through desktops and phones.
Here’s what you can do to reduce your website bounce rate
An effective way to engage visitors on your website is through landing pages. Creating personalised landing pages allows you to target a particular demographic. 68% of B2B businesses are implementing landing pages as key tools for lead nurturing and conversions.
More often than not, prospects visit websites after business hours. It is difficult to always be available on the website to convert them into leads. Moreover, customer expectations are changing and the preference to find a solution in real-time is increasing.
22% of consumers are looking for a service that’s always available, day or night, rather than during typical business hours. Live chat is a convenient medium for your website visitor to enquire about your business in real-time, increasing the likelihood of them converting into a lead. As quoted in an article by SuperOffice, Live chat leads to a 40% increase in conversion rate.
Engaging with your website visitors can give you insights into understanding the type of information they expect to find on a particular page or the website. This can help you tackle not only the bounce rate on your website but also tackle the next important KPI that you need to track.
3. Exit Rate
Exit rate cannot be averaged as website visitors will leave your website at some point, however, exit rate is important to examine on your most popular pages.
The exit rate is basically the percentage of visitors who leave your site when they are on an individual page. Exit rate is relevant to a specific page, as the bounce rate is relevant to a website.
If you have a page with a high exit rate, it is possible that prospects hit a dead end on that page, and don’t find the solution they are looking for.
This is a major obstacle that leads to a higher exit rate, and it is important to know what exactly causes it, in order to tackle it.
Here’s what you can do to reduce the exit rate on a page
Find out if you have the right hooks present on a page with a high exit rate
Let’s take a pricing page with a high exit rate, for example, perhaps the pricing is a problem. Add incentives on the pricing page by strategically adding a CTA button or add a discount popup that would encourage visitors to stay a little while longer on the page. This could reduce the exit rate of the page.
Another efficient way to find out and reduce the exit rate of that particular page is by talking to the prospects on that page, analysing user behaviour, frequently asked queries on that particular page, etc.
Interactive tools such as an online calculator can provide your audience with insights about how much your service or your product can help them. This can help in decreasing exit rates on a particular page.
If more website visitors convert on a specific page, then that page will have a high exit rate, which is normal. A low exit rate indicates longer navigation, which means you are providing your website visitors with quality content and a good experience. Analyse the page to understand what you did right, and make use of the data to then strategise further.
The next two KPIs are probably the most important KPIs to track. These are direct indicators of your success.
4. Traffic to Lead Ratio
63% of businesses see generating traffic and leads as a big marketing challenge. The traffic to lead ratio is a lead generation KPI that highlights the number of people who have converted into leads on your site in comparison to the traffic that your website gets.
The number of leads generated is one factor that shows you how successful your on-site lead generation is. That is, however, only half the battle won, the other factor is your conversion rate that we will be covering in the next point.
It is essential to keep track of this number in order to determine what you want to do in the future. If your website is generating a good amount of qualified leads, you need to pay attention to what you’re doing right to replicate it as you move ahead.
If not, you need to look at the above mentioned KPI’s to determine exactly what might be the issue and how to fix it.
5. Conversion rate
A website visitor becomes a lead when they give you their contact information or take the next step to become a customer, this is what is known as a conversion. Your conversion rate is the percentage of people who actually convert into leads after visiting your website.
To get your conversion rate, your analytics software takes into consideration the total number of website visitors in a time period and divides it by the number of conversions on your site.
Your conversion rate indicates whether or not your lead generation strategies are working. If you have a high conversion rate, it means you are giving your website visitors the right information to convince them to contact you. The more specific you are with your marketing, the better.
Like the exit rate, individual pages also have their own conversion rates. The conversion rate on your website is the average of all these pages. If your conversion rate is low, look at your pages and identify areas where you could improve them.
If your conversion rate is high, that means the hooks that you have used on your website to engage with your website audience and capture them into leads, are working.
Adding more relevant content, including more visuals, elaborating on topics that are particularly important to your customers leads to more engagement on your website, which leads to more conversions.
CommVersion is a Lead Generation partner that helps businesses tackle the above mentioned KPIs. At CommVersion, we generate qualified leads directly from the inbound traffic on your website, reducing bounce rates, and also optimising your cost per lead acquisition. To know more about CommVersion, click here to book a demo.
