How’s your website’s performance? Do you have SMART goals (specific, measure, attainable, relevant, and time-bound)? Or is your website strategy largely based on superficial, vanity priorities?

In this post, excerpted from Lead Generation Best Practices for Colocation Data Centers, you’ll get introduced to a data center checklist that helps you analyze the revenue component of your website performance. You’ll also see which key metrics that you need to pay attention to with website lead generation.

Analyze The Three Most Important High-Level Metrics

So which metrics matters most for generating more leads from your website? What should be on your data center’s checklist for key website performance metrics?

1. Visits
2. Contacts (also called leads)
3. Clients (or in the data center colo world, tenants)

So first, track the number of unique website visitors that arrive each month.

Then, find out the number of website visitors that convert into contacts (leads).

Depending on the perceived value of the premium content offered on the landing page, in many cases we can include enough form fields, also known as contact properties, to automatically segment between leads and marketing qualified leads (MQLs).

And we really, at this stage, care most about first-time conversions, rather than website visitors that return and reconvert on the same or another landing page. Now reconversions are also very worthwhile to watch. But for the purpose of this data center checklist on lead generation best practices, we’ll concentrate on first-time website visitors converting into leads.

And the final metric that you need to watch is the number of leads that close into paying clients.

Slice and Dice Your Data Further to Get More Precise Guidance on the Effectiveness of Different Channels

After you know how many visits, contacts, and clients are generated each month, drill down to the sources of website visits, sources of contacts (again, also known as leads), and sources of clients.

And when you do that, be sure to split out the sources by:

• Organic search
• Referrals
• Social media
• Email marketing
• Paid search
• Direct traffic

Implement Closed Loop Reporting

One final concept that’s critical is Closed Loop Marketing -- which tells you which website visitor sources ultimately turned into clients and revenue.

It’s named “closed loop” because it closes the information loop that bridges sales and marketing.

Closed loop marketing establishes the foundation for aligning sales and marketing teams more productively around shared goals (also known as “Smarketing”).

Often the key missing piece of the puzzle, for effective sales and marketing alignment, isn’t just about better communications or working towards common goals or quotas.

To be successful, closed loop reporting almost always requires that your marketing software platform be fully integrated with your CRM system.

What’s on your data center’s checklist for analyzing your website’s performance? If you’re like most, you likely address the answer from a very IT-ish standpoint: focusing on areas like mobile friendliness, uptime, throughput, and page cache stats just to name a few.

But while all of those are a given, at the end of the day it’s the visits, contacts, and clients that are most likely to impress your CEO, your board of directors, and your investors.

And to follow through on eight other make/break metrics that are critical for generating revenue from your data center’s website, be sure to download your free copy of "Lead Generation Best Practices for Colocation Data Centers."