Article Written by Katina Jaye Beveridge, ASBAS Advisor, Western Sydney Business Centre.
So, you’ve got your marketing strategy and you are running your campaign. How do you know all your efforts are working?
Not measuring results is a common mistake committed by marketers and business owners that are new in digital marketing. They simply implement the marketing campaign and leave it as it is. In fact, according to a 2015 Forbes report, only 22% of marketers are equipped with data-driven initiatives that achieve significant results.
And according to ITSMA and Vision Edge Marketing, 3 out of 4 marketers do not measure or monitor how their marketing efforts impact their business. One of the popular reasons why this happen is that they don’t know what to measure in the first place.
So, let’s discuss first the importance of tracking your marketing efforts.
- It helps you determine the contribution and effectiveness of each platform.
- It provides insights for optimizing your marketing campaigns.
- It adds context to the spikes and declines in industry trends.
- It helps identify opportunities for targeting, testing, and optimization.
- It can help optimize other business processes.
Measuring your ROI determines whether what you’re doing is actually working or not. Knowing these numbers allow you to adjust your strategy or switch to a different platform, depending on the results.
But the question is, what should you measure? It depends on the platform and marketing technique you are using. Here are some common metrics you should watch out for:
Lead Generation
- Online sales
- Online-to-store sales
- Leads from webforms
- Leads and sales from phone calls
- Leads from live chats
Website behaviour
- Website visits
- Pageviews per visit
- Time spent on the website
- Bounce rates
- Traffic by source
Social media
- Number of followers
- Total post reach
- Impressions
- Rate of engagement
PPC
- Cost Per Conversion
- Cost Per Click
- Click-Through Rate
Summary
Some marketers believe that digital marketing results are more challenging to measure compared to traditional marketing. However, with the various marketing analytics tools available on every platform, keeping track of your ROI has become a lot easier.