Inbound marketing is crucial for every business that wants to stay competitive. With so many inbound agencies out there, it gets really hard to figure out which one you should hire for your company. There are lots of things you need to take account like pricing, reputation, experience working style, communication and so on.

However, to assess their performance metrics and estimate your ROI, there are a few Key Performance Indicators(KPIs) that you have to check. Find out if the inbound agency you are about to hire does actually meet the above mentioned KPIs. Below we present 7 inbound marketing KPIs you need to consider when hiring an inbound marketing agency.

1. Email Performance Metrics

Emails make a big part of inbound marketing efforts. This is true for any business. As you acquire some fresh leads, you will need to nurture them with different strategies, and most of those contain email nurturing. So, it is crucial to track key metrics of email performance, for example open rates, click rates, unsubscriptions, as they show how effective is your strategy/campaign and whether leads like what they get. For example, if the click rates increase, this would mean that the right content is shared with the audience and you are on the right track.

2. Customer Acquisition Cost

The next indicator you should assess is customer aquisition cost, which will tell you how much money you need to spend to acquire a certain number of customers. Also figure out if the agency you consider runs any PPC (Pay Per Click) campaigns. If they do, they should be able to estimate the amount of money you will need to acquire X number of customers. With this information it’s easy to calculate your ROI and see if the investment is worth it.

3. SEO

SEO is one of the main sources used to drive traffic to your website. Take a look at metrics like bounce rate, visit numbers, pages visited, and time spent on the website. Make sure the agency keeps track of those metrics and can succeed keeping them at least close to average.  Besides all these indicators, keywords play a huge role as well. Keyword ranking should be among the first inbound marketing KPIs when hiring an agency. Determine if the agency can conduct a good keyword research and come up with relevant keywords for your company.

4. Social Media Engagement

This is probably the most difficult inbound marketing activity to assess. It is one of the most important parts in inbound marketing, because it drives brand awareness and engages with customers. While there are some metrics that you should pay attention to, such as page likes, post likes and comments, the most important one is post engagement. If a post has a lot of engagement and shares, chances that other people will see the post increase. Correspondingly, chances that they will start following you or engage with the post increase too, which in turn provides more engagement.

5. Quality of Leads

During the lead generation process, there exists a huge difference between quantity and quality of leads. For instance, you may generate 5000 leads at $1.5 per lead, and in terms of numbers, you are in a great shape. However, in terms of quality, you might in in a worse shape than you think. If the leads are of bad quality, you end up with close to 0 sales, which means you are losing time and money. It’s technically the same as having no leads at all. That is why quality of leads are among the most important key performance indicators you need to consider. Of course, numbers matter too, but it’s better to have 30 quality leads than 100 random ones.

6. Visit-to-lead Conversion Rate

Another indicator that is worth attention is VTL conversion rate of the website. This indicator shows how many visitors of your website become your leads. Having this information will help you understand how good does your website perform and which are the areas that need improvement. Well performing websites have converversion rates at over 2%. See if the inbound agency can identify any problems why your website got poor conversions and make sure you get proof with calculations, real data or past experience, not just assumptions.

7. Lead-to-customer Conversion Rate

The last KPI you want to pay attention to is lead-to-customer conversion rate. Similar to the previous one, it shows how many leads become customers. By having information about this rate, it becomes easier to see which campaigns and activities had positive impact on the leads of the website. If you see that most of your leads become customers thanks to the recent campaign, it will be a good hint for you to repeat such campaigns again and again. Generating a lot of leads, even of high quality is a good thing, but suddenly becomes pretty useless if you can’t close them into customers. Here we have 7 inbound marketing KPIs that you need to take into account when it’s time for you to hire an effective inbound marketing agency. If you have already hired one, and you think there are more KPIs that are worth sharing, please leave them in the comments box below.