How To Measure the Success of Your Digital Marketing Efforts
As a business leader, you know you can bring a brilliant product or unparalleled service to market, but there are times when you need help to meet your intended success.
Here’s the thing: digital marketing is not a game of chance. You can’t just cross your fingers and hope for the best. Instead, you need to measure your marketing campaigns to see if they’re actually working. It’s like being a doctor and checking your patient’s vital signs — except instead of a heartbeat and blood pressure, you’re looking at website traffic and conversion rates.
Without an effective marketing strategy in place, the individuals, families, and groups of people that could benefit from your efforts may never become aware of what you have to offer! You’re basically throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping something sticks. And let’s face it, that’s not a great way to run a business. So let’s get into the basics of measuring marketing campaigns!
How To Measure Digital Marketing Success
We’ve all heard how our goals need to be SMART — specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely. The genius of data and analytics — the backbone of digital marketing — is that they ensure your goals are measurable.
Having the information you need to tell a successful strategy from a failing one allows you to minimize all-around waste — instead of being led on a wild goose chase!
To measure the success of your digital marketing campaigns, you need to be a master of metrics. How many people clicked on your ad? How long did they stay on your website? How many visitors filled out your contact form? It’s like piecing together a puzzle — the more pieces you have, the clearer the picture becomes!
But don’t worry; you don’t need to be a mathematical genius to measure digital marketing success. With the right tools and expertise, you can easily track and analyze your metrics to see what’s working and what’s not and adjust your efforts accordingly.
It’s all about avoiding ineffective strategies and freeing up resources to focus on the ones that work for you. With our data-driven approach, you can trust that your budget is being spent effectively to maximize your return on investment!
The Role of Data Analytics in Reaching KPIs
But what does measuring data look like in practice? Understanding marketing data is a crucial first step. This process includes any information that paints a clearer picture of your customers — what they want and how to reach them.
Different marketing campaigns gather different key performance indicators or KPIs (i.e., a measurable metric used to evaluate the success of a campaign). These various indicators can be more or less helpful, depending on the industry you’re dealing with. For example, content marketers would be especially interested in the “organic traffic” and “time spent on site” indicators. Part of a solid digital marketing strategy is a strong sense of which KPIs are most important to track.
Without tracking the right KPIs, businesses may not have the necessary data to make informed decisions, thus potentially missing opportunities to optimize their marketing campaigns for maximum impact.
Of course, data alone cannot produce results. While helpful in assessing whether your KPIs are trending up or down, data analytics only become useful when they are married with an understanding of your company’s goals.
To turn data — even highly relevant data — into actionable steps, you need to combine data-driven information with the purpose behind your marketing strategies. With this purpose-driven model in mind, let’s assess the different processes for data and analytics management!
What Are the Best Processes for Data Management and Collection?
Marketing analytics sounds highly technical but can be put into simpler terms: they are the tools and processes that turn data into actionable knowledge.
Three examples of the most popular approaches to marketing analytics include:
- Media Mix Models, which assess data gathered over more extended periods.
- Multi-Touch Attribution, which analyzes individual-scale information from consumer purchases,
- Unified Marketing Measurement, which is a combination of the previous two.
Once a particular model has been chosen, it pays to implement it smartly. Using these models, you can assess a plethora of metrics, such as:
- Bounce rate
- Click-through rate (CTR)
- Conversion rate
- Email open rate
- Social post likes
And these data points are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to measuring the success of your marketing campaigns!
One of the essential practices for today’s marketing landscape is to collect data transparently. Think of the prompt you see when you open a newly-downloaded smartphone app. Users are often allowed to “allow” or “ask app not to track.” Whether it’s permitting location information, syncing contacts, or other data points, consumers appreciate it when companies transparently give them a decision to opt in or out of data collection.
Another great reason to be transparent regarding data collection is that sometimes, to act otherwise is illegal. While the U.S. has yet to see the passage of a data-collection-regulating law on the federal level, many states have taken it upon themselves to regulate the relationship between data-collecting companies and data-providing consumers.
Different laws and regulations apply to data in various fields, with fields as diverse as healthcare, financial institutions, and telecommunications prompting the fine-tuning of different legal expectations. Here, too, it pays to stay vigilant and up-to-speed on the kinds of data collection the law allows.
What Are the Best Data Collection Tools?
The most accessible marketing analytics tool for beginners is Google Analytics. This tool provides data on visitors to your website, such as which sites they came from and how long they spent on your website.
MixPanel is a step up in the sense that it will track the activity on your mobile app as well as your website. MixPanel’s premium version is also more feasible for small businesses than the upgraded Google Analytics tools.
Another tool to consider is Cyfe. If you’ve taken a few steps down on your digital marketing journey and have an array of data points to track, Cyfe functions as a “dashboard” so that they can all be viewed in one place. It covers both social media and sales platforms, with widgets integrating other tools like Google Analytics or Salesforce.
Klipfolio is another dashboard-style competitively-priced tool for any businesses looking to upgrade their marketing analytics experience.
It provides a view of your business’s performance, allowing you to make data-driven decisions to optimize your digital marketing strategy. However, using such platforms can be challenging.
At Hit Your Mark, we understand the importance of tracking and measuring your data to optimize your digital marketing strategy, as well as keeping a pulse on all other related marketing disciplines. While there are many powerful tools to choose from, we take a holistic approach to data tracking and marketing to provide a complete and accurate view of your business’s performance.
What Are Key Metrics To Track?
Even with the perfect marketing analytics tools in place, your organization might still fumble the opportunity to harness analytics if you’re paying attention to the wrong data points and KPIs.
All the infrastructure in the world won’t help unless you’re taking in data that can be turned into actionable steps to grow your business. The top metric, unsurprisingly, is revenue. But there’s still much to be learned after revenue is accounted for!
What Are the 10 Marketing Metrics To Use?
The 10 key digital marketing metrics include:
- Click-through rate
- Conversion rate
- Cost per lead
- Customer acquisition cost
- Customer lifetime value
- Goal completion rate
- Leads
- Page views
- Returning visitors
- Web traffic sources
A complete picture of these metrics will give you a real-time view of how your business is doing and, with some analysis, how it could be doing better.
Conversion rates, for example, measure the number of consumers who “converted” as a percentage of the total number of consumers that visited your website. Whether it is opening an email, making a purchase, or filling out an online form, the number of conversions is only significant compared to the number of potential ones.
If thousands of people see your content, but only a few dozen are being converted, that could be a sign that you’re marketing to the wrong audience.
But there’s hope! With insights from accurate conversion rates, page views, and other KPIs, you can make your digital marketing strategy much more efficient! Once you switch to data-driven marketing decisions, you’ll wonder how you got along without them!
Use Metrics To Rocket Marketing Effectiveness!
If metrics or data are the banes of your existence, don’t worry! Just let the experts at Hit Your Mark handle it. We’ll crunch all those numbers and analyze all that data, leaving you free to focus on what really matters, like drinking coffee, your business, or your next meeting. Because let’s be honest, who wants to spend their days staring at spreadsheets and graphs? Not you, that’s for sure. So book a discovery call with HYM and finally get the boost your marketing needs!
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