Know Where You Are Going, and How to Tell if You are Headed in the Right Direction
Both digital and traditional marketing campaigns rely on measurements to gauge success. Many of these measurements have bridged the gap between traditional campaigns and modern, digital strategies, but with a different perspective and set of expectations. Let’s explore exactly how you should measure the success of your digital marketing campaigns.
Start with a goal:
One of the best ways to benchmark your success is to know what you’re building towards before your campaign launches. Goals will obviously vary from business to business and campaign to campaign, but using hard numbers to measure success is important. Shy away from leaving goals vague (ie. “I want to grow”, “i want people to see my ad”) – you should use numbers to objectively measure your success at the end of the campaign. Also important to your goal building should be a solid timeframe. Build your measurements like scientific data is built – __________ per _________. This can be impressions per week, conversions per month, or any other goal, but creating solid timeframes creates a better environment in which to measure your success.
Measure your traffic:
Generally speaking, the goal of digital marketing is to grow your online presence via advertising. Your hosting platform should provide you with charts or graphs of your website traffic over time. If, after you launch an ad campaign, you see an uptick in your page visits, chances are good that your advertising efforts have been effective! To further assure that your new traffic is coming for your advertisements, check your traffic by source. Most platforms will show you the following sources: organic search, direct visitors, referrals, and social visitors.
Keep track of your conversion rate:
Converting contacts to sales is one of the most important aspects of an advertising campaign. Contact to sale can also be contact to; subscription, contact lead, a completed download, etc… It all depends on your business type. The ability of your business to convert audience members into customers is a key factor in determining the success of an advertising campaign.
Track your social reach:
Whether advertising via social media, email, or general web-based ads, tracking how far your efforts reach is important. While social media platforms make it incredibly easy to track impressions, knowing who exactly is seeing your content is more important yet. Email marketing and advertising through search engines are both incredibly efficient ways to track your reach, as most hosting platforms will provide you with the types of insights that will matter most to your measures of success such as age, location, and gender of those people which you reached. Social media platforms also engage in that type of reporting, but can be less efficient in their reporting.
Tabulate your Cost per Click:
In email and paid marketing campaigns, it’s important to track how much you’re spending versus how many click throughs your ad is generating. As with most campaign goals, your cost over engagement matters; the lower your cost per click is, generally the more successful your campaign is!
There are limitless ways to measure your success; figure out what is best for you! Digital marketing, just like traditional marketing, is all about your return on investment. While investment is an objective component of the formula to success, what you determine the “return” to be is up to you. If you’re in need of exciting new ways to collect and explore the data which your digital marketing strategies could generate, contact us at M1-Data today. Our team of experts and wide variety of products and services are waiting to help you and your business succeed.
