Ensuring Success With Thorough Measurement Of Your Campaigns
You’re investing time and money in digital marketing, but how do you know if it’s actually working? Measuring your results is crucial to understand what’s effective, what needs improvement, and how to get the most out of your campaigns.
Even more important is the correct measurement of your campaigns.
Key Metrics to Track
Let’s start with business KPIs.
- Website traffic
Monitor the number of visitors to your website, where they’re coming from, and what pages they’re viewing. Tools like Google Analytics can provide valuable insights for websites of all shapes and sizes, and is just one of the elements I include in all Vitals kits and wishing any website build project.
- Conversions
Track the number of people who take a desired action, such as making a purchase, filling out a form, or signing up for your email list. Conversions can be pretty much anything that you want them to be; they don’t need to have a monetary value automatically assigned to them in order to be measured. Conversions should support the direction towards your overall goals and objectives.
- Leads
Measure the number of qualified leads generated by your digital marketing efforts. Often business like to be able to understand the customer journey and flow that results in the end conversion, and by measuring leads, you’ll be able to build context for length of time to conversion, as well as building your prospects.
- Sales
Probably the most common KPI across businesses. Ensure you track the number of sales attributed to your digital marketing campaigns. To create a truly attributed view enabling you to understand the influence of each digital marketing channel as a collective effort, you’ll need to consider a platform agnostic measurement tool.
- Return on Investment (ROI)
A critical metric, and if you’re not currently tracking ROI, you really need to be. Calculate the return on your investment by comparing the cost of your campaigns to the revenue they generate. Setting this up so that you can see this for each campaign and activity within each individual channel will allow very specific learnings as to which areas of your campaigns work well and which ones don’t work as you’d hoped.
In addition to business, every single digital platform will also have its own metrics and ability to measure performance. These differ from platform to platform, and often don’t offer consistent in definition.
Top tip! If you are measuring within a platform, be conscious that the performance of other channels is NOT visible to that platform in most cases. This means you can have duplicate conversions and a miscalculated understanding of your ROI.
To measure your full digital marketing channels as correctly and accurately as possible, consider using a tool such as Google Analytics or a broader data visualisation platform, such as Tableau.
Tools for Measuring Success
- Google Analytics: A free tool that provides comprehensive data about your website traffic and user behaviours. This can connect into a variety of other digital platforms and tools, and offers customisation in its reporting and measurements, and is, in my opinion, the best free analytics tool out there.
- Social media analytics: Most social media platforms offer built-in analytics tools to track your performance. Many of the social platforms will report on the same metrics, however will have these defined slightly differently, so it’s worth considering that the performance you will see platform to platform can vary due to this.
- Email marketing platforms: Email marketing platforms provide data on open rates, click-through rates, and conversions, and are not to be sniffed at! The key to making the most of your email marketing analytics is in the way in which you segment your audience and define your customer groups.
- CRM systems: Customer relationship management (CRM) systems can track leads, sales, and customer interactions. These systems vary in size and capability, from large scale enterprise level solutions such as Hubspot and Salesforce, through to smaller tools for individual businesses. With this one the data you input and the way you use the system determine the quality of the output.
Analysing Your Data
- Identify trends
Look for patterns in your data to understand what’s working and what’s not. Make use of visualisation tools to quickly spot movement in your trends, and remember overlaying AI to your data can be a huge time-saver when it comes to interpreting and analysing your datasets. - Set benchmarks
Establish benchmarks to track your progress over time. You need to know what normal looks like, and be able to quickly identify fluctuations to that baseline. This will help you build on successes much quicker, as well as preventing declines making a significant impact on your business. - Make adjustments
Use your data to make informed decisions about your digital marketing strategy. Understand your campaigns, and whether they are performing as you expected and within an acceptable ROI. Always remember to allow new campaigns a short learning period initially, before considering constant optimisation cycles to improve and streamline performance.
Measuring your digital marketing success is an ongoing process, and is endless while ever you have digital activity active in the market. By tracking the right metrics and analysing your data in the right way, you can optimise your campaigns and achieve your business goals.
Get your data to work harder so you can be smarter…
Ready to level up your digital marketing measurement?
Contact me today for a free consultation to discuss your business goals and explore how improving the measurement, insights and reporting from your digital marketing campaigns can help you achieve your goals.
Let’s go on the adventure together…