Measuring the effectiveness of your marketing campaign is as important as marketing itself. If you don’t measure the return on your marketing investments, you would never know if you are heading in the right direction or not. It goes without saying; measuring the effectiveness too is a well-defined procedure just like deploying a marketing strategy or any other business-related activity.
Here is a stepwise procedure involved in tracking the results of any marketing campaign.
Step 1: Plan the marketing method and the measuring metrics you’ll use
Planning is the first step for anything you do to improve your business or even personal life. It is not only the first but also the most crucial step because failing to plan means planning your failure. So, be careful about choosing and planning the methodology you’ll be using for marketing your business. While planning the marketing campaign, you’ll simultaneously need to plan the metrics you’ll be using to measure the results. To know more about measuring metrics, you can read this well-written article on measuring analytics.
Step 2: Define the channels you’ll be tracking
You can best track the results of your marketing campaign when you divide the traffics received in small subgroups. Some of the most common traffic subgroups, technically called as channels, are discussed below:
- Direct – These are the potential customers who visit your site by directly typing your website address in their browser without being directed by a third party.
- Referral – These are the people directed to your website by a third party; this may be through backlinks or your PPC ad link.
- Organic – This is the traffic that comes to you while searching for product or service similar to your company’s product or services. You generally get this traffic when you are website is ranking for relevant keywords.
- Paid – This is the traffic you get due to the ad campaign you run and you’ll surely like to track this traffic because you are investing a lot in them.
- Social – These are the people who find you while using various social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn etc.
Step 3: Define the marketing metrics you’ll be using
The marketing metrics defined in the simplest word is the collection of numerical data that gives you an insight into the results of your marketing investments. Some of the most common ways to generate the data to create your marketing metrics are as follows.
- Web Content – This is the study of the effectiveness of the contents you place on your website. You need to track the percentage of people who followed you to take the action you set for them through your contents.
- Lead Conversion – In this method, you’ll need to track the prospective customer when they first came in contact with your website to the point where they turn into an actual customer. By following this track you’ll know the stage where you lose your leads and fail to convert them. The analysis can help you point your weakness.
- Bounce Rate – This is the number of people who came to your webpage but left immediately without taking an action or going to some other page.
- Page Views – The amount of time each visitor spends on a certain page. This helps you know which page of your website is appealing more to your prospective customers.
Step 4: Measuring your marketing campaign
Once the planning of tracking your marketing campaign with the certain parameter is done it’s time for doing the actual tracking.
- Measure your search marketing performance – You can track the performance of your SEO and PPC campaigns by embedded code on your web pages. It is important to know how you are performing on the search engines.
- Measure the effectiveness of your social media marketing – Almost all the major social media channels have inbuilt analytics to track the performance of your contents. You should leverage the benefit of this analytics to track your social media performance and plan your strategies accordingly.
- Measure backlinks and other media performance – By setting up tracking URL, you can measure this type of things. When you do guest blogging or use any other method to get backlinks, you should also consider measuring their performances.
- Measure the result of your paid advertisements – When you are paying for advertising yourself, you must track the performance otherwise you won’t know whether you are utilizing or wasting your money.
Hope you succeed in getting the true picture of your marketing performance by effectively analyzing the measuring metrics.