When it comes to learning how to measure effectiveness of marketing campaigns, the execution of a marketing strategy is the most important expenditure that a company can make. Of course, just having a strategy isn’t enough – you must use metrics for measuring the effectiveness of marketing campaigns to determine whether or not they were actually successful.
A good marketing strategy is measured by analytics tools; you should be able to attribute what efforts have led to a growth in your customer base. Unfortunately, it’s not always easy to determine the direct results of your efforts. Fortunately, different marketing metrics make it possible to give a more detailed and clear analysis that provides a good idea of how your campaign is performing.
Here’s a list of metrics for measuring the effectiveness of marketing campaigns.
Traffic
The simplest way you can tell if your campaign is working is by analyzing your website traffic data, which is easily accessible via Google Analytics. If you don’t already have Google Analytics set up on your company website, do it now!
A few metrics for measuring the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, easily visible on the Google Analytics dashboard:
Page views: The cumulative number of individual pages that users are viewing/clicking in a period of time.
Unique visitors: Overall traffic to your website, or at least the best indication of it. Users are only counted once during a given span of time, which may result in page views that are higher than unique visitors. Higher page views than visitors are a good thing, and mean that your content was engaging enough for users to view more than one page.
Search engine traffic: the amount of traffic that is coming from search engine sources such as Google search or Bing. This can give some indication as to whether your content optimization for search is effective. Look at referrals to determine what other websites and platforms are sending the highest amount of traffic to your website.
Monitor traffic before implementing a new campaign to create a baseline metric to compare once a campaign or other significant marketing efforts are launched. The difference in these metrics will give you a good understanding as to whether or not your efforts are working.
Marketing Contribution to Revenue
One of the most obvious indicators for measuring the effectiveness of marketing campaigns is the effect they have on sales. Done well, your marketing efforts will show an impact on your overall company revenue.
Comparing sales before, during, and after the completion is one of the more simplistic ways to judge if your marketing efforts have made any significant differences. Just make sure to understand the delayed effects on some areas of effectiveness. Some results will not be translated immediately. It’s also possible that some benefits were not monetary (brand awareness efforts/website activity). It’s important to compare this metric with others for a more complete picture.
E-commerce transactions with leads from online ads and content are the easiest to track directly in regards to sales. However, don’t let the challenge of attribution stop you from finding ways to attempt to measure it.
Conversion Rates
A conversion rate is the percentage of your website visitors who are responding to calls to action within your content.
Most marketing campaigns base their conversion rate on a specific action by the user, including:
- Signing up for an email newsletter
- Downloading free ebooks
- Leaving feedback via an online form
Conversion rates can show different stories depending on what you’re looking for, or what you’re asking customers to do. The average conversion rate for a desired activity is 2-3%, depending on the industry. Most companies strive for a conversation rate of 5% or higher as a result of targeting specific audiences. The lower the conversion rate, the higher the cost per lead becomes.
When dealing with email, it’s important to look at open rates and click through rates as they give valuable insights on the quality of the content you are sending. Email content is powerful for lead generation and social media engagement and should not be overlooked. Ensuring your marketing team is adapting your email lists to account for bounce rates and unsubscribers allows for an up-to-date communication list that is valuable to your success.
Inbound Links
Inbound links are the number of external links from other websites, to your website. The existence of inbound links means that other people are linking your website (or content) on their own website because they found it useful. This may be because you asked them to through a backlinks campaign, or because your content is so good that it speaks for itself. Regardless, the more high-quality inbound links you have, the higher rank your website/content will have on search engines.
Inbound links also do more than just increase SEO rankings and the like. Inbound links establish credibility, create spikes in brand awareness depending on the size of the external website, and have the ability to bring in new customers or clients.
Measuring the metrics without a proper understanding of what they mean won’t necessarily help you to determine how effective your marketing campaign is. So gather your figures, and determine the best course of action for translating them. Understand that some positive results, like brand awareness or overall company growth, are hard to attribute. But having a deeper understanding about metrics for measuring the effectiveness of marketing campaigns will help you show how your efforts fit into the bigger picture.
Are there other metrics for measuring the effectiveness of marketing campaigns that we didn’t cover? We’d love to hear your thoughts!
