Too often we see people invest in digital marketing and simply just hope for the best! You go to all the effort of putting a plan in place and creating the relevant strategy, content or assets, but then …
… crickets!
How much money did you make? Did your customer base grow? What was the ROI on your social media efforts? If you’re unable to answer some of these very basic questions on the effectiveness of your digital marketing campaign, then how could possibly determine whether it was a success or not? In today’s blog, we take a look at some of the ways in which you can measure the effectiveness of your Digital Marketing campaigns.
Establishing Value Over Vanity: metrics that matter
It’s important to understand that simply being a ‘thought leader’ for a given industry, doesn’t automatically mean it’s a metric you should measure. Similarly, it’s often easy for someone to =get carried away thinking social media ‘likes’ are the most important thing to measure. These are vague and generally unhelpful to the bottom line! It’s best to focus on metrics that correlate to ROI and direct value, as opposed to simply vanity. Here are some examples:
- Vanity: Web traffic, keyword rankings, time spent on site, bounce rate, followers, impressions, views
- Value: eBooks, whitepapers, conversion rates, qualified leads, acquisition costs, customer lifetime value.
Making sure you construct your framework in terms of valuable metrics is a very important starting point in measuring your digital marketing effectiveness.
Google Analytics: your toolkit for tracking ROI
Where would we all be without Google Analytics? Our friendly giant who helps us easily sort through and understand data from all things digital. The free dashboard tracks the performance of all of the pages on your site and all associated campaigns. Every time someone interacts in any way with your site, the information is captured and fed into a meaningful report which can help you to calculate the value of each lead and how much money they will potentially bring into your business. Making sure that you assign a dollar value to all leads is imperative in measuring your effectiveness.
Conversions: creating commercial goals
To ensure you’re getting the most out of your analytics reporting, you will need to set up proper ‘Goal Completions’ and ‘Events Tracking’ functions which automatically help you pull together different types of conversions within your campaigns. A conversion basically means that a desired action is being taken on your website and these can be broken into two different categories:
- Micro Conversions: actions that may have a future commercial impact once nurtured properly. This includes things such as newsletter subscriptions, eBook downloads and setting up an account.
- Macro Conversions: actions that are directly linked to commercial value such as contacting a salesperson, a demo request or a purchase on site.
Your primary goal in measuring your effectiveness online should be to increase conversions by capturing information where ever you can and adding them into your sales funnel. We recently looked after a conversion campaign for one of our clients where the goal was to increase bookings for a clinic and the results have been extraordinary! Here’s what they had to say:
“Hi Joe, I just wanted to say thank you for all the hard work you have done for my clinic. Since turning on the online presence on the weekend past, the clinic has had non stop phone calls and we are fully booked. I know it’s a combination of things but feel your behind the scenes work is just brilliant and am very grateful for the results!!! It’s insane to see the turn around from being dead to utter craziness.
So thank you….. I have immense respect for you and your team’s ability!!!”
DR ERIN KEFFORD
Campaign Channels: how to measure them
Once you have designated your ‘Goal Completions’ into Google Analytics, which might be things such as ‘eBook download’ or ‘newsletter signup’ Google will begin to log the conversions as well as where they came from, which page they came through prior to converting and then also all other actions taken. Measuring these events successfully will mean your digital marketing efforts will be metrics driven and forward moving. Here are some other metrics you might like to consider, broken up into different marketing channels:
- Search Engines: click through rates, backlinks, organic positioning
- Social Media: brand mentions, content shares, engagement
- Email: Call to action click throughs, lead-to-customer conversion rate
Objectives: what matters to you most in the short & long term?
While your short answer might be simply ‘revenue’, using such a high level goal isn’t entirely practical on a day-to-day basis. And sometimes, digital marketing plans and strategies can take some time to come to fruition before you begin reaping the rewards. It’s more beneficial to look at marketing investments in terms of ‘annual returns’ rather than immediate gains (although the latter is still very possible!) By establishing short and long terms goals, you will ensure you stay on track during the campaign and can measure it effectively.
Where to from here?
Automation is very quickly becoming the new norm! What this means for measuring digital marketing effectiveness is that it is more paramount than ever before! Measuring your campaigns accurately can also be an indicator for finding new target markets and greater market share. You can’t manage what you can’t measure, but more importantly you can’t market what you can’t measure!
If this process all seems a bit bit much from the outset, not to worry, we are here to help! Get in touch with a Digital Junkie today to find out how we can help you with your digital marketing strategy.