By Before Facebook, Snapchat, and YouTube, marketers struggled to measure the ROI of campaigns. In the past, data was not available to provide insights into campaigns. Today’s analytics can do this. You would not know, for instance, how long the average viewer watched a Super Bowl advertisement or whether the Super Bowl advert directly led to sales. Digital marketing campaigns make this information readily available if you know what to look for.
Even with the abundance of data and information available today, marketers still have difficulty determining what metrics to focus on and where to find them. We can help. We’ll look at the best ways to measure your marketing performance.
Set goals
All marketing initiatives, whether online or offline, should begin with goals. Your marketing strategies will be more effective if you set SMART goals. SMART stands for specific, measurable, actionable, relevant, and time-bound. Digital marketing requires SMART goals. You need to set clear and actionable plans in order to measure your results.
Unsure of what a SMART digital marketing goal should look like? Here are two examples.
- Email Increase subscribers of 10,000, decrease the churn by 20%, increase the conversion rate by 10%, and attract 50,000 over a 6-month campaign.
- SEO: Spend $25,000.Expend $25,000 to optimize the SEO of your website for six months. Expect a 30% increase in traffic.
You should ask yourself the following question when defining SMART campaign goals: Will my initiative continue to deliver results? What is the value of this project in the long run? Would I invest again in this campaign based on its goals and outcomes?
You may want to rethink your investment if you are unable to set goals for an effort or a campaign. Spend your time and money on a strategy that will yield quantifiable results.
Tracking your efforts
It would be best if you had a strategy for measuring and testing the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. There is no one-size-fits-all method to track all your metrics.
You need to examine each digital marketing method individually if you want to get valuable insights. Below is one of the most common digital marketing methods, as well as information on how you can measure and analyze marketing performance.
SEO
Does the money and time you invest in SEO improvements pay off? Your keyword ranking is one of the most crucial metrics for search engine optimization. The higher your keyword ranking, the more likely it is that your website will appear on the first Google search result page.
Search engine traffic quality is another metric you should pay attention to. How long do users stay on your site? How many pages are they visiting in a single session?
Google Analytics gives you access to all of this information. You should be able to see that the users spend more than 20 seconds browsing if you are targeting the correct keywords. You may want to use different keywords if that’s not the case.
Social Media
Social media has many metrics that you should consider. Be sure to pay attention to metrics like the overall engagement per week, new subscribers, likes, and the most popular posts. Social media may not contribute directly to your ROI, but it can still be a major source of traffic.
How do you measure the growth of your business across these platforms? You can get free analytics on many popular social media websites.
Remember that engagement levels will fluctuate, no matter which social media profile you use. You may find that one post only engages 10% of your total number of followers, while another is “viral” and well-received by many people. You can track the seats that are doing exceptionally well to see if there is a formula you can use in future posts.
You can track the number of leads and conversions that your social media posts generate. Calculate the cost of each new information and return on investment using a customer lifetime value calculator.
Social media can be a powerful way to reach new audiences. Social media marketing can be difficult to quantify, but it will boost your PR and help you build a stronger relationship with your customers.
Email Marketing
Email is not dead, despite the many years of warnings. A business that has an online presence must have an email list. More subscribers will lead to more sales. Set your own list growth goal based on current subscribers. Then, you can track the results using your email deployment software’s campaign manager.
You’ll also want to track the open and click-through rate. You can set a goal of 2% and 20% click-through rates (or more), but you should make sure that the benchmarks are based on industry standards similar to yours. You can view analytics in a marketing automation platform such as MailChimp. You might try split-testing to find out what content your audience likes if you are experiencing low open and click rates.
Last but not least, you should consider how many sales your email list generates. If you have a lot of subscribers, but they don’t convert into sales, your efforts will be wasted. By linking your marketing automation platform with Google Analytics, you can eliminate the guesswork and see actual conversion numbers.
The Big Picture
After you have analyzed and measured the results of different digital marketing techniques, it is time to look at their relationship to your ROI. The results will reveal which campaigns are profitable and which are straining the company.
Search Traffic
Does your SEO strategy work? Yes, if 40%-50% of your website traffic comes from search engines. Google Analytics will help you to determine the amount of traffic that your website receives from search engines. You can also get the numbers for each page.
Campaign Traffic
Digital marketing campaigns are powerful tools. Customers can continue to interact with your brand for a long time. When you run a campaign, keep an eye on how many people interact with it and click through to your landing page or website.
Referral Traffic
Referral traffic refers to traffic directed at your website by a source other than a traditional search engine. Referral traffic can often be attributed to inbound links and social media posts.
Google Analytics can help you track your traffic by providing information on the referral paths. Add bit.ly to your social media posts or campaign posts in order to learn where your traffic comes from.
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