How to Measure the Success of Your Digital Marketing Campaigns
According to research, over 72% of businesses and companies have not paid close attention to their ad campaigns in more than a month. These companies fall into this category because they don't have any idea on how to go about it, or how to measure their digital marketing success.
If you fail to monitor and measure your ads campaign, one thing is sure to happen, all your budget is likely to go down the toilet. But there is good news for you. This article will help out as we will cover how to measure digital marketing success by sharing six metrics to watch.
What Does It Mean to Measure a Marketing Campaign’s Success?
If you’re new to marketing campaign measurement, here’s a quick explanation: It is a structured process for determining whether your marketing efforts helped you reach your campaign goals. It involves using metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs), like the ones we present later in this post, to make a comprehensive assessment of your campaign’s performance.
Why Measure Your Marketing Campaigns?
You must track your marketing efforts while they run. Otherwise, how can you make timely changes? You want to know if there was a chance to focus on a better approach. It might have helped you convert more clicks into conversions. You don't want to wait until the end of a campaign to find out that your ad is failing with your target demographic.
Future campaigns may be improved using the knowledge gained from the tests. Furthermore, you can be sure you're not squandering money and have proof to convince others that your marketing initiatives are having a favorable effect.
How to Set up Your Digital Marketing Campaigns for Success
If we are to talk about ways to measure Digital marketing success, we cannot go by not talking about how to set your campaigns up for success. There are three important points you need to take note of to ensure you can accurately and effectively measure your campaigns:
Let’s dive into each of these more below!
Set Realistic Goals:
One cannot evaluate marketing performance without first defining objectives. You will not be able to fairly assess the performance and effectiveness of your campaign if you do not know what you are aiming to accomplish.
To accurately measure campaign performance, it has to be specific, actionable, timely, and realistic. Meaning it should be within reach and relevant to your business.
Realistic goals for digital marketing are ideal because they inspire you to develop exact objectives to examine metrics and ascertain if you have fulfilled what you aimed for. If your broad objective is "Earn more leads," it's challenging to evaluate if you met that target. How many "More" are in leads? You have to generate these fresh leads quickly.
Know vanity metrics:
Looking at digital marketing statistics can easily overwhelm you with abundant data accessible to your company. But you must first understand vanity metrics before you begin evaluating marketing outcomes. Vanity metrics are those that seem excellent but have no influence on your company's digital marketing performance.
These numbers do not indicate that your marketing initiatives are turning out results. Some of these vanity metrics are:
Ok, let's say that you took a look at your Facebook page and you found out this page has about 6000 followers. You might think that such a huge number means your current marketing strategy is working. But that is not always the case. You then have to ask yourself, are these 6000 followers engaging with your content? Are they buying your products or seeking your services?
Now you know that having followers doesn’t necessarily mean you’re achieving your marketing goals, whether it’s earning leads or sales –– that’s why you want to stay away from using these metrics to measure your overall success or returns.
Set up Google Analytics:
You have to set up Google Analytics if you want to gauge the performance of digital marketing. Google Analytics helps you to evaluate your marketing effectiveness and retain all of your campaign data in one location. Here’s the simplistic way to set up Google Analytics:
Key metrics for measuring digital marketing success
Every digital marketing tool you want to use in your all-encompassing outreach campaign will have a means of gauging performance. Here are 5 digital marketing KPIs to keep in mind as you consider the best ways to connect with your potential customers.
Website Traffic
One of the objectives of digital marketing is to draw visitors to your website, where you can assist them in completing the customer journey toward—should everything go well—a sale. For this work, Google Analytics is a handy tool that lets you monitor metrics related to incoming traffic.
Your website may measure several essential performance metrics, including Google Analytics.
Conversion rate
Although people are browsing your website, is this translating into sales? Dividing the total number of visits to your website by the number of sales completed can help you determine the conversion rate.
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Suppose, for instance, that owing to a Google Ads campaign, you get 20,000 visits throughout a month and only earn 500 purchases. 4% is the conversion rate.
Cost per acquisition (CPA)
Keeping an eye on the cost-per-acquisition (CPA) rate is brilliant, as the expenses of a digital marketing plan usually mount up fast. Your CPA guides you in pivoting your marketing expenses beyond what each new client pays for your goods and services. It also shows you what each new customer costs your business.
Examine your product costs and CPA according to industry norms. Note that a better CPA might not be damaging if you offer pricey goods or services.
ROI, or return on investment:
A more all-important statistic is the return on investment (ROI), which compares the outcomes of your marketing strategy to the total expenditure involved. Although your CPA only addresses the particular cost of your advertisements, ROI will also consider the expenses of other strategies and web tools like your website. Track your marketing expenses for every platform and compare them to your income increase.
Your effort using fresh demographic data could have helped you better understand your target market. Perfecting your strategy will benefit you going forward.
Click-through rate (CTR)
The click-through rate, or CTR, is another often-used critical performance metric. It links any online campaign you run to let potential consumers click and visit a landing page.
CTR is a good metric since it directly shows your clients' involvement with your digital marketing initiatives. Another way to calculate how often individuals saw your ad is to divide the overall number of clicks by the entire number of impressions.
6 Steps to Measure Your Marketing Campaigns
As we have reached this point, we believe you would have a bit of an idea of how to measure your marketing campaign. All right, in this section, we will provide you with six steps that can help you develop a solid approach for how to measure marketing campaign effectiveness.
1. Define KPIs
In marketing, a key performance indicator (KPI) is a numerical statistic you may use to gauge how your campaign is doing toward its stated objectives. Examples of KPIs include conversion rate and bounce rate. Later in this post, we’ll look at these and several other KPIs you may want to track, depending on the objectives of your campaign and the key results you’re driving toward.
2. Provide a Campaign Time Frame
Your next action, considering your KPIs, is to specify a beginning and an ending point for monitoring and evaluating data about your marketing campaign. Whether your period is days, weeks, or even months, defining a measuring schedule will enable you to track progress toward your objectives and make necessary changes to ensure you meet your intended benchmarks.
3. Make a Measurement Plan
Measurement should occur throughout a campaign's life, so create a measuring plan to identify changes over time. As was already said, you might miss significant opportunities to implement necessary adjustments to increase results if you wait until after a campaign ends to compare its performance with your objectives.
4. Select the Correct Marketing Tools
Make sure you measure a marketing effort using the correct instrument. If the campaign calls for social media, for instance, it seeks to use analytics tools offered by the relevant site, like Twitter or Instagram.
We have already discussed this free, generally utilized tool for marketers: Google Analytics. Finding out where, why, and how people visit your website may be very helpful.
You may also run your campaign on a separate URL to monitor results in Google Analytics more readily. In such a situation, you should consider including Google Campaign URL Builder among your available instruments for evaluating marketing campaigns.
You may want to think about call monitoring if your products are bought from the mobile phones of your customers. With the same accuracy you track your internet conversions, this program lets you count the phone call conversions you generate.
5. Create benchmarks
Consider not only the campaign's outcomes. Create benchmarks throughout the measuring process and include them in your measuring plan to help you evaluate development during the campaign and create targets that will propel you toward success.
6. Build a dashboard to present results
Throughout the process, you collect a lot of data and actively evaluate your campaign's performance. You want to let other vital decision-makers and stakeholders know about your findings, but you also want to ensure they can quickly understand them—ideally, see the data in real time. Creating a KPI dashboard can assist you with this.
Conclusion
Ok, what other key digital marketing metrics examples should we have included for measuring success with brand growth?
One more thing.
When you measure digital marketing success, you can see if your campaigns are working for your business. But if you don’t know where to start with measuring results in marketing, Mirald Scale Content can help. We’re one of the best digital marketing agencies out there. Our team creates campaigns that drive results—we've driven over $100 million in revenue and over 15 million leads for our clients in the past five years alone. Ready to get help with your digital marketing? Contact us today to speak with a strategist about our digital marketing services.