6 Crucial KPIs You Should Use When Doing Lead Generation

1. Bounce Rate Tracking Is Crucial for Generating Leads

One of the best ways to assess the performance of your lead generation strategy is to look at the bounce rate. The bounce rate is one of the lead generation KPIs that can help you check whether your site is relevant for your target demographics.

It’s a straightforward metric. The Bounce rate stands for the number of your website visitors that navigate away from your website without checking out other pages.

For instance, if someone finds your website on search engine result pages (SERPs), clicks on a link to your website, and then goes back to look at other websites in SERPs, this is a bounce.

All analytics tools calculate the bounce rate using the same formula – the total number of site visitors divided by the number of visitors who immediately left the site.

What does the low bounce rate tell you? If this KPI is low, it is a good thing. Most visitors that come to your website spend some time on it, exploring and reading various content.

On the other hand, if the bounce rate is high, then most of your visitors bounce off to other websites upon arrival.

Several factors contribute to high bounce rates. They can range from slow loading speeds to website content irrelevant to your target demographic.

In any case, you need to take all the factors into account so that you can identify what could be potentially wrong with your lead generation strategy or website. It is the only way to identify problems and reduce the bounce rate.

This lead generation KPI is crucial for success and getting lead value.

2. Conversion Rate Shows the Success of Your Lead Generation Efforts

You probably know that conversion goals reflect your marketing goals. A conversion goal can be to have a website visitor subscribe to your email list or complete a purchase.

Why is it relevant for lead generation metrics?

Lead generation and conversion go hand in hand. Finding out how many conversions your landing pages and homepage earn is very important.

When a website visitor decides to provide you with personal information and subscribe to your email list, he or she automatically becomes a lead.

In other words, the number of conversions equals the number of leads.

Boosting a conversion rate at the same time means fueling your lead generation strategy. This is why the conversion rate is one of the most useful KPIs for lead generation to track.

Conversion rates, just as bounce rates, represent a ratio. In this instance, a ratio of your website visitors and those that convert (take an action that you wanted them to take).

It is important to note that all your site’s pages have different conversion rates. The overall conversion rate is the average value of all your pages combined.

It is tempting to make statements like: “Anything around 5% is considered a good conversion rate”. But to be honest it depends on the context completely. The quality of the traffic affects it as well as the industry.

But if you would like to give some general rules of thumb, that really do not apply you can say that usually if your conversion rate is below 1%, it is not really good, but sometimes it still can be.

But even 5% can be not that awesome, if you are talking about a conversion rate of a specific landing page, that could convert 20%.

The best strategy to improve your conversion rates is to assess the pages with the highest volume of content on your website. This is where something goes terribly wrong when your visitors arrive.

Try to improve the layout, add high-quality content (text and images), and make your call to action (CTA) more prominent.

The changes provide instant results. Make sure to check your analytics software frequently and keep your eyes peeled for the changes in the conversion rate.

(Pro tip: Reviews and testimonials on websites are proven to improve conversion rates. Sign up for the free version of Trustmary!)

3. Average Time on Page

Average time on page is the next KPI you should monitor with an ongoing lead generation initiative.

It is a simple metric showing you the average time your website visitors spend on your site before they bounce off to somewhere else.

With excellent analytics software in your hands, you will be able to monitor the average time on page for every individual page on your site and the average time on page on your website as a whole.

This is an essential KPI, and learning how to read it will help you improve your lead generation efforts.

Low average time on the page indicates that your visitors are spending too little time going through your content. So how much value do your marketing channels have if the bounce rate is high on your posts? Do your ad spend numbers assigned by your marketing team make sense when tracking engagement of interested prospects?

High average session duration tells you that you did an excellent job content-wise, and your visitors decided to stay and read what you have to say.

However, low and high average session durations on their own mean practically nothing.

How come?

A high-performing landing page will have a low average session duration and a high conversion rate.

On the other hand, you may have blog pages with high average session durations but high exit and bounce rates.

Average time on page is a KPI that you should always consider with other lead generation KPIs in mind, including conversion, bounce, and exit rates.

Other KPIs give meaning to average time on page, and without them, you can’t make the right decisions.

It can help you tell relevant from irrelevant content and learn a lot by comparing pages with high and low average session durations.

Pay special attention to your pages with a text that takes at least a couple of minutes to read.

If the average session duration is measured in seconds, it means that something is not good.

Make your content more relevant and engaging to increase the average time on the page and generate new leads. Also, ensure that your average lead is as close to a qualified lead as possible as this will impact your cost metrics.

4. Lead quality is one of the crucial lead generation KPIs

Thanks to your ongoing lead generation strategy, you will reach many prospects. However, not all prospects have the same intent.

Some of them will be interested in only researching what you have to offer.

On the other hand, some prospects can be just a few steps from making a purchasing decision. What they lack is a vital piece of information that will help them decide to purchase.

Lead quality is perhaps the most important KPI to track.

It will help you assess your lead generation strategy’s performance in terms of the quality of the leads it generates. It can help you fine-tune your marketing campaign efforts to reach more relevant prospects and turn them into qualified leads.

What should you track?

The lead quality KPI is the number of interested prospects. Your goal is to get to as many interested prospects as possible.

Low lead quality typically comes with low conversion rates and high bounce rates. It means that you are not targeting the right demographic and that your messaging is not as effective as it should be.

On the other hand, a high number of interested prospects means that you did an excellent job with your marketing initiative.

If you are struggling to attract interested prospects, you should reconsider your marketing campaigns. Refine your targeting strategy and help your sales team generate leads that can realistically translate into customers acquired.

Try expanding your reach or make targeting more specific so you can get more leads from your organic traffic. You should also take a look at your offer, consider a new sell proposition, and change your messaging to attract more interested prospects. Important lead generation KPIs assist you in efficiently generating people that have lead value and help your business generate qualified lead material.

More leads and lead value are easily identified through important lead generation KPIs which are a key metric in this whole story. This is a lead generation KPI you need to watch.

5. Main Lead Channels Give Insight for Marketing Efforts

Today, it is almost impossible to have only one lead generation channel if you want outstanding lead generation performance.

Prospects use different methods to look for products and services which can make creating lead generation campaigns to capture sales qualified leads a bit more taxing on your marketing budget.

If you have an official website and social media accounts, you already have several lead generation channels.

Add marketing efforts to the formula, and you have even more lead channels. The most common ones are: organic (via search results), paid, referral, and social media.

Identifying your main lead channels will help you discover where your leads are coming from. Why is it important? Your main lead channels have everything to do with your marketing strategy. Once you identify your main lead channels, you will be able to assess your marketing strategy’s performance and effectiveness.

There are a couple of ways to do it. Most analytic tools provide you with your website traffic reports. You can clearly see where most of your website traffic originates from. These reports include various details, including whether your visitors are coming from desktop or mobile platforms.

Some tools even automatically calculate lead generation rates per channel to help you easily track traffic sources and identify high-performing channels. You can do this manually hassle-free. All you have to do is divide the total number of generated leads by the number of visitors that came through one channel

Feel free to ask the qualified leads that contact you directly via a web form how they’ve heard about you. The more information you have, the better when it comes to getting insights and making data-driven decisions.

A low lead generation rate for a particular channel indicates that something is off with your marketing strategy. It can be something with your targeting or messaging. In either case, you should try to fine-tune your approach and see whether it delivers expected results. If no action bears results, it means that your target customers are not particularly fond of using the platform you use to reach them.

Channels with high lead generation rates are the bread and butter of your lead generation strategy. Maintain your focus on them and include them in your future marketing efforts to get consistent results.

6. Cost per Lead

Cost per lead is a metric that goes hand in hand with lead quality. Among all the lead generation KPIs, this is the only one that can help you assess the cost-efficiency of your lead generation efforts, calculate ROI, plan your budget, and base your future projections on accurate financial data.

It stands for the total amount of money you invest in generating a lead (customer acquisition cost). To be precise, we are talking about the average cost per lead here. You can calculate it by dividing the amount of money you spend on generating all your leads with the number of qualified leads generated.

Make sure to take into account all customer acquisition cost, such as the cost of your analytic tools, subscriptions to services you use to capture leads, content marketing, and paid ads costs. Some of the materials used for lead generation can be reused in future campaigns (such as free ebooks). Services based on subscription, such as email marketing software, can also be used in future campaigns.

To assess cost per lead accurately, you have to modify your formula and divide the recurring and one-time costs by the number of campaigns you use them for. For instance, you paid a $50 subscription for email marketing software and used it to launch ten campaigns. The cost per campaign is $5, and this is the number you need to use to calculate the cost per lead generated in those campaigns.

Cost per lead is also useful if you want to step up your budgeting game channel-wise. You can calculate the cost per lead for every marketing channel to identify those that are cost-efficient. With this data at your disposal, you can custom-tailor your strategy to get the best results for the least money possible.

Lead generation is a long term effort despite the size of the business and target market. Tracking KPIs for lead generation we listed above will put you in complete control of your strategies and greatly helps your sales team improve their lead generation performance and the efficiency of your sales funnel. You will be able to assess the performance of your marketing initiatives both in general and per marketing channel.

Furthermore, as you could see, specific KPIs for lead generation indicate what could be off with your approach. And, at last, you can assess the cost of your lead generation strategy and make your operation cost-efficient.

It can be a really big downer to reach a potential customer and determine that his/her customer lifetime value is not worth the effort of your sales teams and that you need more qualified leads and interested prospects for your average deal to be worth it. A sales qualified lead is worth more for your sales process than random organic traffic so you have to figure out important lead generation metrics and marketing and sales efforts so your ultimate conversion rate makes sense.

How to Improve Lead Generation Results?

The simplest way to improve your overall conversion rate on lead generation is to start using testimonials and social proof.

By adding testimonials to your lead generation forms, you’ll be able to increase those conversions rates.

Trustmary has tried-and-tested library of lead generation forms available that are already supercharged with social proof.

Further Reading

• 6 Lead Generation Form Examples (+How to Design Converting Lead Gen Forms)
• How To Use Testimonials in Marketing
• 14 Best Tips on Lead Generation for Technology Companies
• 7 Strategies for Lead Generation in B2C That You Can Copy
• 13 Biggest Conversion Rate Optimization Benefits

FAQ