Traffic and lead volume are common metrics that most marketers and businesses track. But unless you are tracking your conversion rates it is easy to be deceived by the illusion of growth.
Here's a simple example that will highlight the growth illusion:
Most marketers would be thrilled to see a monthly visitor graph that looks like this one below. This shows tremendous month over month visitor growth.
At the same time any marketer would be proud to have a corresponding lead graph like this one that's demonstrating 5% month over month growth. It looks very compelling!
But, despite the phenomenal growth in visitors and leads your conversion rates could be going down, dramatically! In this case the conversion rate has gone from just over 13% to below 10% in 6 months (almost a 25% drop).
The reality is, today businesses are buying traffic. In fact buying is the wrong word, they are leasing traffic. Outbound marketing such as email rentals, PPC ads, banner ads, press releases are essentially methods for leasing targeted visitors to ones site.
However, once your campaign is over, your lease expires, and you need to renew your spend and pay for new visitors to your site. And more traffic means spending more money. But, unless your conversion rates are steady or increasing, your ROI is going down.
The key to owning your marketing is managing your conversion rates and keeping your costs down. Inbound marketing is a great way to do that while hitting your growth goals.
Photo credit: TheTruthAbout
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