Regardless of the size of your business, there’s only one way to tell whether any marketing campaign that you launch is achieving the goals you have in mind or not—that’s by measuring its progress. To successfully track the progress of any marketing campaign, marketers should determine which metrics they’d use before they launch the campaign.
Having these metrics makes it easier to understand which aspects of a marketing campaign are working well and which ones aren’t. When the performance of a marketing campaign isn’t measured, it becomes extremely difficult to tell whether the campaign is contributing positively to a company’s lead generation, sales volumes, or even profit levels.
If you’re already running an email, a social media, or a pay-per-click marketing campaign (or if you have plans to launch one), here are five ways you can measure its progress:
1. Track Conversion Rates
As you run a marketing campaign, you need to keep track of conversion rates. Essentially, the conversion rate is the percentage of visitors are converted into leads or customers. While not every lead will become a paying customer right away, you can determine the quality of leads that your campaign generates by measuring the actions they take and the time they spend on the website.
Ideally, the longer your visitors stay on your website, the more they’re likely to convert into customers at a future date. As your campaign progresses, there should be positive changes in terms of visitors completing specific actions that turn them into leads or existing leads making purchase decisions that turn them into paying customers.
Measuring conversion rates enables you to determine whether your marketing campaign is having positive results or not.
2. Monitor Website Bounce Rate
Tracking bounce rates is another approach to marketing performance measurement. In very basic terms, bounce rate is the number of people who visit your company’s website and leave without interacting with it. Also referred to as single-page sessions, bounce rates can give you an indication of visitor behaviour.
Bounce rate could result from people feeling dissuaded by pop-ups, or not liking the images or layout of the site. Measuring your website’s bounce rate during a marketing campaign enables you to tell how your target audience interacts with your website. A high bounce rate could mean that your audience is experiencing challenges in finding the information they need or in interacting with key pages of your website like the homepage.
3. Monitor The Overall Web Traffic
Whenever you launch a digital marketing campaign, one of the easiest ways to measure its performance is to monitor changes in the overall traffic. This is pretty easy to tell, especially when you use Google Analytics. By going to the ‘all traffic’ section, you’ll be able to tell the number of people who engaged with your site and even know where that traffic came from.
Keeping an eye on your overall traffic data enables you to have a broad picture of how your marketing campaign is influencing the traffic you receive on your website. A general rule of thumb is that if your marketing campaign is going well, your traffic volumes will gradually increase over time.
As you track web traffic, consider monitoring your search engine rankings. Search rankings are critical to driving organic traffic to your site. These rankings enable you to know how your site performs when people search for terms that are relevant to your business. If you’re running a pay-per-click campaign, measuring your search ranking performance enables you to determine whether your marketing campaign is pushing organic traffic to your site.
4. Check Engagement Levels
The other way to measure the progress of a marketing campaign is to pay attention to engagements. In digital marketing, there are various aspects of engagement that you can track during a marketing campaign. For instance, you can track the actions that people who visit your site take in order to push them down the marketing funnel.
Some important aspects that help you with monitoring engagement include monitoring how customers complete desired actions like downloading content assets, completing lead capture forms, signing up for trials, or creating accounts. Measuring engagement enables you to identify the specific aspects of your website that people interact with the most.
Engagement levels also enable you to determine the quality of the experience that your site offers users as well as other less tangible aspects. In any marketing campaign, low engagement levels could be a sign of offerings that aren’t appealing to a target audience, a poorly designed campaign, or an audience that’s simply not interested in your offerings.
5. Measure Your Campaign’s Return On Investment
As you roll out your marketing campaign, you need to pay attention to the sales revenue that the campaign generates for every dollar you spend. For instance, if you spend USD$100 on the campaign, and the campaign generates USD$500 in sales, then your return on investment is USD$400. Tracking the return on investment during a marketing campaign enables you to determine whether the campaign is effective or not. You’ll also be able to tell if the campaign is generating quality leads and determine its effectiveness.
The Final Word
Marketing is a critical aspect of every business. However, launching a marketing campaign doesn’t automatically mean that your marketing goals will be realized. You need to measure the progress of your campaign regularly to determine if the campaign is effective.
