When your business spends so much time and money on marketing, you want to make sure you’re getting a good return on your investment. Assessing the success of a marketing campaign helps you see what did and didn’t work. This will ensure your future marketing campaigns learn from earlier experiences and improve, so your business can grow and your money (and time!) can be put to the best possible use.

Planning Your Campaign

Types of Marketing Campaigns

As soon as you start planning your marketing strategy, you need to clearly identify certain things that will influence how you eventually measure its success. What type of marketing campaign will you use? There are two main groups of these campaigns – inbound and outbound. Inbound marketing involves bringing people ‘in’ from the marketplace using strategies like email campaigns, web content and search engine optimisation (SEO). Outbound marketing involves going ‘out’ into the marketplace using direct mail, outbound calling, TV/print/radio ads and PR campaigns.

Your Campaign Goals

Ensuring you know what your campaign goals are during your planning stage will help you down the road so you have a clear idea of what you need to measure.

Are you wanting to improve on your brand awareness, brand perception, audience engagement, lead generation or something else completely?

Once you know what you want your campaign to target, you can set goals such as social media engagement or growth, number of leads generated, press coverage etc. Try to be as specific as possible! Remember to consider your current performance prior to starting the campaign and how that compares to industry standards.

If you need help defining your goals, download your free eBook here to set and achieve your SMART goals!

Tracking Success

With your goals set, you now know what criteria will mark your campaign as successful, so the next step is to decide what channels you want to track. Split up your website traffic into different categories and pick which ones to monitor most closely.

Common Marketing Channels

• Direct channels are the visitors who find your business in a direct manner, such as someone who sees a TV ad and types your website address in manually to learn more information about your brand
• Referral channels are the visitors who find your business through a third party
• Organic channels are the visitors who find your website through a search engine
• Email channels are the visitors who come through clicking on an email campaign
• Paid channels are the visitors who find your business through an ad campaign that you paid for, such as print or Google Ads
• Social channels are the visitors who found your brand through social media

Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s)

KPIs are metrics that help you measure how on track you are to achieving your goals. There are long lists of different kinds of KPIs, so it is important to pick the ones best suited to achieving your goals. The most important KPI is return on investment (ROI) which uses a collection of numerical data to judge how efficient your investments were by looking at the sales revenue a campaign brought on every dollar spent. ROI is the best way to measure how well your budget was utilised to generate the most profit for your business.

20 Popular KPI’s:

1. Cost Per Win: Measures the expense of individual sales
2. Cost Per Lead: Measures the cost-effectiveness of campaigns by focusing on the numbers of leads generated, but this doesn’t measure the quality of the leads
3. Conversion Rate: Measures the percentage of visitors that convert into leads and/or customers
4. Incremental Sales: Measures the contribution of marketing efforts towards sales
5. Customer Lifetime Value: Measures the lifetime value of a customer by calculating the “average sale per customer” multiplied by the “average number of times a customer buys per year” multiplied by the “average retention time in years for a typical customer”
6. Multi-Channel Funnels and Attribution: Measures the overlap of your marketing channels
7. Web Content: Measures how your web content educates visitors and gets them to take action
8. Individual Visitors: Measures when a visitor first uses your sites and the number of times they revisit
9. New Visitors vs Returning Visitors: Measures how effective your new site content is in driving traffic
10. Click-Through Rate (CTR): Measures how many people visited the webpage and those who went no further vs those that took action
11. Cost Per Click: Measures how much you pay for individual user clicks through both pay-per-click marketing and social media platforms with click-to-site ad features
12. Cost Per Conversion: Measures cost to convert a site visitor into a sale
13. Bounce Rate: Measures how many visitors go to a page and leave without visiting other pages or taking action
14. Exit Rate: Measures where exactly visitors leave after reviewing web content
15. Impressions: Measures the overall views your web content or ads receive including multiple visits by an individual user
16. Page Views and Session Duration: Measures the number of webpages viewed and how much time a visitor spends on a page
17. Search Engine Referrals: Measures what keywords people searched that referred them to your website and through which search engines
18. Social Media Effectiveness: Measures likes, mentions and follows using tools built into social media sites
19. Word of Mouth: Measures effectiveness of the campaign through follow-up surveys and/or asking questions on purchasing forms
20. Email Openings: Measures how many emails were opened based on how many the campaign sent.

If you feel like you need more KPIs that reflect your goals more specifically, or you want more information on the ones listed above, Meltwater has a detailed list of 50 metrics to measure your marketing campaign.

Note, keep your measurements simple.  Only track the KPI’s relevant to the goals you’re trying to achieve.  Data is the key to decision making, but make sure the data you’re reviewing helps you in your decision making.

Analytical Tools

Tools are a great way to help you measure the success of your marketing campaign and there is a wide range of options available with different purposes and price options to suit a range of business needs.

• Google Analytics: This is one of the most well-used platforms to measure your traffic. It’s free to use and you can choose between options for small businesses and larger enterprises.
• Marketo: This is Adobe’s marketing analytics platform, and it a really popular ROI tool that takes important data and displays it in a very clear format. Pricing is according to 4 tiers for different businesses types (select, prime, ultimate and enterprise), but is calculated according to database sizes.
• Kissmetrics: This service has options for both e-commerce and software as a service (SAAS) businesses. Their prices are tier-based and range between $300 and $500 monthly (or $2,669 to $4,199 per year), but they also offer custom plans.

When it comes to measuring the success of a marketing campaign, personalisation is everything, you have to choose what’s right for you! But having clear goals, tracking the best KPIs and using the tool that works best for you will help you figure what works best and what needs improving. Don’t forget, outside influences happen and things go wrong, but if you continue budgeting your marketing carefully and measuring your success rates, you will eventually see growth in your business.

Want to learn more about how to grow your business, download your free guide here!