Measuring The Success Of Your Marketing Campaigns

You’ve launched a new marketing campaign but you’re still not sure how exactly you measure whether it’s been a success or a failure. Many businesses fall short in the analytical stage of a marketing campaign, getting too caught up in designing the creative and not spending enough time understanding how you measure and track the results. There are a few things you should consider before you even launch the campaign, as despite what a lot of people think, results start at the beginning.

Define Your Goal

How can you measure success without knowing what success is? Quite simply, you can’t. Before you begin even thinking about the campaign itself, you need to identify what your goal is and what you want it to achieve. In the majority of cases, this will be revenue based, which makes It even more important to know how much money you can invest and expect to see in return. This will give you a clear insight into whether the campaign delivers. Keep your definition of success broad, as until you have enough data to track and measure against, there’s no point expecting specific results.

The Lightbulb Moment

Know your idea. Have a clear understanding of what your campaign may look like and what channels you will use to reach your goal. Planning is key to launching a successful marketing campaign. Knowing whether you are going to be using paid media, organic content or a mix of both, will provide you with different variables and insights, which is why you need to make sure you are tracking each channel effectively.

Why Track Your Campaigns?

Many businesses only remember to track their campaigns once they’ve already been launched and by then it’s too late. If you want to be successful and see a return on investment with your marketing strategy, you need to implement proper tracking procedures. Tracking helps you clarify which campaigns aren’t making you any money so you can reinvest your money into the campaigns that are. Test a few campaigns, to begin with and these will form your baseline from which you can create new campaigns. You have to get stuck in so you will have something to compare new data to.

Measuring Success

Once you’ve done the above, you will have a clear understanding of what success means to your business and that specific campaign, so now it’s time to get tracking. There are various ways you can track your campaigns and measure your results.

Split testing – Also known as A/B testing, is a great way to track conversions from whatever you are split testing. You’ll have a direct comparison of results and statistical analysis that will determine which performed better.

Website traffic – You can analyse all of your marketing campaigns through your website analytics and work out how many of those web visitors lead to conversions. Again, this will give you a much better insight into what campaigns lead to those all-important sales and lead generations.

Customer relationship management system – A CRM database is essential for non-eCommerce-related businesses that can’t measure sales through web analytics. This is particularly relevant in industries such as property marketing where leads and sales are often done in pitches on the phone or in person, which can be hard to measure. Store all of your leads and contacts in a CRM database and you’ll be able to measure how those individuals came across your business. Remember that all-important question: where did you hear about us?

Paid campaigns – If you’re running your campaign on Facebook or through Google AdWords, you’ll easily be able to track and keep on top of all your campaigns through them. However, we would recommend setting up your own Excel document where you keep track of all your campaigns in one place, which channel they are running on and keep them up to date with results. You may find that Google AdWords isn’t working for your business but Facebook Advertising is, so you’ll want to adjust your budgets accordingly.

Goal tracking in Google Analytics – There’s more to Google Analytics than just tracking pageviews and visitors to your site. Using Google Analytics Goals, you will be able to keep track of more important metrics like leads and newsletter signups. Goal funnels then allow you to track individuals through each step of the marketing process, that way you can see exactly when people decide to abandon your site and what pages need improvement.

Facebook Pixel – Just by adding a small piece of code to your website will make a huge difference to how you measure your marketing campaigns. The Facebook Pixel allows you to build ads and create custom audiences based on the actions of visitors to your site. You will be able to see detailed insights into how people use your website and then deliver tailored ads accordingly, improving your conversion optimisation.

Snapchat have recently introduced the Snap Pixel as a way for advertisers to track the direct responses of users in order to drive leads and product sales. After all, who better to target than those who have already shown an interest in your site or products.

Keep on top of those KPI’s – You should have defined what these are before even launching your campaigns so you have a better understanding of whether they are meeting them or not during the tracking process. Whether you base them around the level of engagement you receive on a post, or the number of conversions from an email campaign, as you receive more data, you’ll be able to make more well-informed decisions on the performances of your campaigns and what to do with them going forward.

Data warehouse – If you plan to deal with large amounts of data, it might be worth investing in a data warehouse, or something like Glew Analytics, which merges data from multiple sources in order to work out the lifetime value of a customer amongst other performance metrics.

It can be tricky to keep on top of your marketing campaigns and make sure you are regularly checking results and tracking each channel, but it is vital to seeing success and a return on investment. Working with a digital agency to deliver your marketing strategy can mean clear results delivered to you on a regular basis, alongside evaluations of how your campaigns are running and what can be done to see them improve. If you would like more support with your digital marketing strategy, contact us here.