Simple Steps to Track the Effectiveness of your Marketing Campaigns

This blog post is extracted by Neha Jain from our new eBook, “The Essential Guide to Internet Marketing”.

“How and what do we measure to determine digital marketing campaign success”? It seems like an impossible question to answer with a single solution.

 The short answer? It depends on your business goals and objectives.

 So, now you are at the bottom of the sales and marketing funnel. That means you need to review the performance of your various marketing activities, identify the winning ones, and eliminate or -- drastically modify -- the ineffective campaigns.

Let’s review some metrics to monitor and suggestions for refining your Internet marketing strategy.

• Identify Opportunities

 When you review your marketing activities, figure out what you want to improve. Do you want more people coming to your blog? Do you want to convert more of the visitors on your home page into leads? Get into the mind set of constantly looking for new opportunities.

• Set a Metric for Success

 In almost all cases, your metric should be quantifiable and involve a set time frame. For example, “Increase website leads by X% over the next X days.”

• Refine Your Strategy

 Analyze how your programs performed. Make changes with the intention of achieving your marketing goals by doing less of what doesn’t work and more what works.

• Evaluate Performance

 Determine if you’ve met your success metrics. If so, stick with your strategies. If you haven’t met it, see what you could have done differently. In either case, continue to monitor the metrics to make sure the improvement has a long-term effect.

Metrics to Track and Report On

 Let’s discuss what the relevant metrics are:

Marketing Grader - Instantly find out the weaknesses and strengths across your marketing funnel. Your Marketing Grader report will reveal information that will guide you through any optimization process

1. Traffic - Overall, how many people are coming to your website? Look into what channels drove the most and least visits. Take that knowledge, make iterations and launch campaigns that will increase visits.
2. Leads - How much of this traffic are you converting into leads and potential customers? This number should be constantly growing to ensure a steady flow of revenue.
3. Customers - You should always be mapping your campaigns and channels to customer acquisition. How many sales did you close this month? How does that compare to last month’s performance? The ability to make this comparison is invaluable to any marketing organization.
4. Customer Acquisition Cost - How much are you investing to draw in each new customer? If you rely primarily on outbound marketing methods, like trade shows and direct mail, your cost per customer is probably pretty high.
5. New vs. Repeat Visitors - Of your overall traffic, how many visitors are returning to your site, and how many new people are finding you? Both types of visitors are good. Attracting new visitors means people are finding you through search. Attracting repeat visitors means you’ve given people good reasons to come back to your site. The key is finding a balance.
6. Effectiveness by Channel - What promotion channels or referring sources are sending you the most traffic? Focus on long-term results, not short-term traffic spurts you might get from news coverage or press releases.

Key Steps for Improvement

1. KEYWORDS - Try new keywords or variations of keywords to see if they help you get found better. Since each page on your site can incorporate different keywords, there are tons of ways to do this.
2. SEO - See if changing a simple on-page SEO factor can help boost visits. Examples of on-page factors are page title, meta description, and headings. As a simple test, try changing the page title of one of your web pages to see if you generate more traffic.
3. CONVERSIONS - Try new things with your conversion forms or landing pages. For example, make a change to the layout by switching up the form placement or featuring an image that’s completely different from what you currently have.
4. CONTENT - Determine which content is bringing you the most traffic and leads. This could be an opportunity to either focus more on that kind of content, or refine your promotion of other content.
5. SOCIAL MEDIA - Evaluate which social media channels are generating the most site visitors and leads. Again, you can either focus on your successful social media platforms, or try improving your performance in your less successful ones.
6. LEAD NURTURING & EMAIL MARKETING - Maybe you’re sending emails too frequently -- or not frequently enough. Maybe the calls-to-action in your email are not appropriate for your audience.

Remember: Always keep experimenting and testing! For reporting on your analytics, consider how often you’ll be asked to measure performance of campaigns in the future and consider a dashboard with key metrics pulled out for easy reference.