When building a digital marketing campaign, you cannot expect it to become an overnight success. It requires lots of planning and strategizing. You will first need to set the right goals. For example, increasing brand awareness and maximizing traffic requires using different tactics. Above all, a successful digital campaign is a result of measuring the right metrics and gathering analytics data continuously.
Still not sure how to track the performance of your digital campaigns? Here are a few simple steps to take right now.
Start by Setting the Right Goals
Before you start building your digital marketing campaign, you first need to set the right goals. Knowing what your objectives are, you will have something to strive for. Above all, your digital marketing goals directly impact the metrics you will choose. Not knowing what your campaign goals are and how and when you will achieve them, you will not be able to choose realistic metrics and measure them objectively.
For example, your digital marketing goals should be to:
increase brand awareness
generate demands
build customer relationships
increase customer retention
inspire evangelism
maximize conversions
Each of these goals requires a specific set of tactics you will use, channels you will invest in, and metrics to track. In other words, each of the goals you set requires you to support it with a detailed plan. Even though choosing digital campaign goals depends on multiple factors, such as your audiences and niche, you should always make sure they are SMART – specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely.
Set a Clear Time Frame
When discussing digital marketing goals, we mentioned they need to be timely. Accountability is a critical aspect of your campaign performance measurement. No matter if this is a small project or a complex one, you will need to build a detailed and strict reporting period that will guide you. This way, you will be able to understand whether your campaign is performing as expected and reaching the targets you have previously set.
Automate the Digital Campaign Measurement Process
The digital marketing analytics tools you will invest in sure depend on your campaign’s specific needs. Say you want to invest more in PPC. You will probably start tracking your campaign success via Google Analytics, given that it directly integrates with Google Ads. To gain a better insight into your campaigns, you will use additional tools like Twitter Analytics, Facebook Social, SEMrush, etc. However, using multiple tools to track results in real-time may be frustrating and confusing. Luckily, you can use automated SEM reporting tools to streamline your PPC analytics.
Namely, digital marketing reporting tools like Reportz let you create custom marketing dashboards, where you can combine different widgets from the SEM analytics tools you use. This way, you can eliminate all irrelevant metrics your analytics tools offer and focus on only those KPIs that are relevant to you. Reportz even offers predefined templates for different digital marketing campaigns that will serve as your guideline. Another amazing benefit of automated reporting tools lies in the fact that they let you combine your SEO, SEM, email marketing, and social media marketing data to get a wider picture of your digital performance and understand how these tactics intertwine.
Choose the Right Metrics to Measure
Now that you have set realistic goals and equipped yourself with the right tools, it is time to choose what metrics you will track. Again, this depends on the specific needs and goals of your digital marketing campaigns.
The key metrics to focus on are:
Measuring traffic metrics will tell you a lot about the overall performance of your website in organic search, paid search, email campaigns, or social media campaigns. If your traffic is poor, this may mean that you are targeting the wrong audience, providing them with irrelevant content, or you have underlying website quality issues. Here are the vital traffic metrics to measure:
The overall website traffic – the overall traffic all your digital channels send to your website.
Traffic by source – informs you where your visitors come from (direct visitors, social media visitors, organic visits, referrals). This way, you will know what channels drive the greatest traffic and which ones require more attention.
New visitors vs. returning visitors – indicates the relevance of your website, as it tells how many people find your site relevant enough to keep coming back.
Average session duration – how much time people spend on your website.
Page views – the number of pages viewed.
Pages visited – informs you about the most popular pages on your website.
The bounce rate – the number of people that visit your website and leave it right away. The high bounce rate indicates that something is wrong with your site, be it UX design, content, products, etc.
Mobile traffic – tells you what percentage of your visitors come from mobile devices, as well as what browsers and devices they use, what content they consume, and what channels they usually come from (social, referrals, organic search, etc.)
Conversion metrics
When not observed from the lenses of conversions, your traffic may be a vanity metric. For example, if your traffic is high, but your conversions are low, this means that your offers don’t resonate with your audiences or that your design/content doesn’t meet their needs. Conversion metrics include:
Total conversions – the total number of website visitors that converted, whether by purchasing a product, downloading a lead magnet, or subscribing to your newsletter list.
The click-through rate – is the rate at which your links are clicked.
New visitors vs. return visitors’ conversions – helps you how your first-time customers interact with your website, compared to your returning visitors.
Lead to close ratio – shows how many of your leads convert, informing you about the effectiveness of your sales reps.
Revenue Metrics
The cherry on the cake is revenue metrics that let you understand how profitable your digital marketing campaign is. Let’s see what to track:
Value per visit – it does not need to be a revenue metric. Instead, it calculates the value a visitor adds to your site when visiting it, be it by reading your blog, writing a review, or making a purchase.
Cost per acquisition – shows the total cost of acquiring a single customer on your campaign.
The return on investment – tells you whether your marketing tactics are profitable. If your average purchases do not exceed the sum you invest in acquiring customers, then it means that you are wasting your money.
Over to You
Remember that there is no one-size-fits-all strategy to apply when measuring the success of digital marketing. Your tactics will depend on where you are in the vast digital marketing spectrum. Based on your industry, the type of your website, and the digital channels you use, you will first need to set realistic goals and pick the metrics to track. The KPIs mentioned above are the most common ones, but this does not mean you will need to track each of them. Prioritize the ones that illustrate your campaign success and choose the right reporting tool to track your performance in real-time.