Here's how you can pull the right data to learn if you're inbound campaign is on track or if it has gone wayward:

1. Setup: Establish goals or targets

The first step is to always have a goal that you're working towards. If you don't have goals in place, look up industry benchmarks as a start, or throw caution to the wind and set ideals, that you can use as a company benchmark when you have more real data to work with. Having those goals in mind will make it all the more interesting and rewarding when you achieve your goals. So, you have goals in place and you're now trying to get a handle on what's working. Where to next?

2. Setup: What are you trying to review

The three areas generally focused on with inbound campaigns are increasing visitors, leads and customers. Your time spent reviewing should relate to which of these you're analysing the performance of.

Here's how you can quickly extract the information or data from the most popular dashboards. From there it's about understanding what's working and which areas to focus on more or give less time to.

3. Tracking: Correct configuration

At Y&C we use both HubSpot & Google Analytics to review and refine our inbound marketing efforts.

Depending on how many different campaigns you have running, you should always plan to have clarity around attribution of your efforts. What does that mean? Allow adequate tracking for each and every campaign.

For Hubspot users check out this resource to make sure you've correctly setup your account. Ensure you have the standard tracking code, plus tracking URL for any external visibility. e.g PPC, Display, Social campaigns.

For Google Analytics users you'll want to setup custom or campaign tracking. Check out the Google how to here.

Tip: Always be sure to annotate within your dashboard/s when one campaign started or ended. You can do this in HubSpot by creating campaigns and in Google Analytics by creating annotations.

Also, remember to Sync your Google analytics dashboard with your Google Adwords & Google Webmasters accounts. View instructions here for Adwords & here for Webmaster Tools.

Reviewing: Establishing Visitor Metrics.

Here are some questions you might like to answer to help uncover the relevant data points.

• How much did traffic increase or decrease?
• What were the main drivers?
• How much did organic traffic increase?
• Can you identify keywords that are bringing in the traffic?
• Which keywords should we target?
• Have our rankings improved?
• Did key pages improve?
• Did our cost per click increase or decrease?
• Has traffic to the blog helped traffic to the site overall?
• How many articles got posted?
• Which topics performed best?
• Notable number of inbound links?
• How did social media contribute to traffic?
• How do our social media grow or shrink?
• How active were we on preferred channels?

Where to find the data:

Hubspot Dashboard > Reports > Sources
Hubspot Dashboard > Reports > Page Performance
Hubspot Dashboard > Reports > Keywords

Google Analytics > Acquisition 
Google Analytics > Behaviour 

Reviewing: Analysing Contact Metrics

Here are some questions you might like to answer to help uncover the relevant data points.

• What content offers did we develop this month?
• How productive were these offers in terms of leads?
• How were these offers promoted on and off site?
• Landing Page conversion rate?
• Visits to landing pages?
• What A/B tests did we run?
• How did email contribute to traffic and leads?
• How many emails were sent and to which lists were they sent?
• Performance of each send?
• Click Through Rate?
• Unsubscribe Numbers?

Where to find the data:

HubSpot > Reports > Landing Pages
HubSpot > Reports > Email Campaigns

Google Analytics > Acquisition > Campaigns

Non HubSpot - Refer to Email Service Provider e.g Inbox 25, Campaign Monitor or Mailchimp.

Reviewing: Understanding Customer Metrics

Here are some questions you might like to answer to help uncover the relevant data points.

• What lead nurturing campaigns were active this month?
• How many lead reconverts did lead nurturing drive?
• Click through for each lead nurturing email?
• Unsubscribes for each lead campaign?
• Which other offers were used in lead nurturing campaigns?
• How many contacts reached the goal of the campaign.
• How many customers did inbound marketing drive?

Where to find the data:

HubSpot > Workflow Tool
Google Analytics > Conversions (Requires Config) though won't allow for full customer data set.

Now that you have the data it's important you can apply it to your goals and gain valuable insights. The idea here is that you can revise your strategy and go about implementing tweaks, or wholesale changes. Scale up or scale down with various elements of your strategy. For more around getting started with Inbound Marketing, pop your details in below for a copy of Inbound 101.