How To Measure The Success of Your Digital Marketing Campaigns

So, you’ve started running some digital marketing campaigns, but you’re not sure how to interpret the results?

Measuring the success of your marketing can at times be difficult to grasp if you don’t know what you’re looking for. If you’ve set up your campaigns, you’re halfway there, but creating complex digital marketing strategies doesn’t mean anything unless you can effectively measure the results.

How Do I Define Success?

Before you can say whether your campaigns are successful, you need to figure out what ‘success’ looks like to you. 

Depending on the products or services you offer, the end goal of your campaigns will be different. For example, an online food retailer might consider success to be a purchase on their website, but for an interior designer, a consultation call could be the desired conversion action.

The best way to ensure you can effectively measure the success of your digital marketing campaigns is to set clear goals for them from the outset. That way, you can assess whether your digital marketing efforts are helping you to achieve your targets. 

You could use a framework like SMART goals to set specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound targets to work towards. 

Instead of saying “we want to get more social media followers”, with a SMART goal, you might say “we want to gain 30 new followers on our Instagram profile within the next 2 months. We can achieve this by posting valuable content once per day, using relevant hashtags and following others within our industry”. 

By setting your goals clearly from the beginning, you have specific metrics that you can measure once your pre-determined timeframe has finished.

Once you’ve defined your goals, whether it’s driving more traffic to your website, generating more leads or attracting new customers, you should review which actions you need to take to reach them. 

If you’re not sure where to start, we have a handy checklist you can use to help you see where you have gaps in your marketing setup.

Why Is It Important To Measure The Effectiveness of My Campaign Results?

Keeping a close eye on the outcomes of your digital marketing campaign allows you to track any new customers or marketing qualified leads it has generated. It also helps you to determine cause and effect - what did you do and how did it influence your results? 

Being armed with this information means you can figure out what does and doesn’t work to engage your target audience.

It’s not a one-and-done solution though, and your strategy will change over time. Digital marketing is a constantly evolving industry, and what worked for you a year ago, or even a few months ago, isn’t necessarily what works today. 

Data is at the heart of it all and there is always something new to be learned from it. So, without the ability to measure the effectiveness of your marketing on a regular basis, you can’t make informed decisions about future campaigns. 

This is really important, as tuning in to your measurable marketing metrics will be a key component of your long-term success.

Which Digital Marketing Channels Can I Measure?

Whichever marketing channels you use to reach your target audience, you can track the results of when you start running your campaigns. For example, social media platforms, paid ads, SEO and email marketing are all trackable channels. You can also find out statistics related to your website.

The metrics each channel provides will be slightly different, but relevant to what they do and how they’re used (more on this below).

If you’re still confused about where to start, we don’t blame you. Navigating through all of the data you’re provided with can be tricky at times, even for the experts. 

But, there are methods and tools you can use to help you make sense of it all.

What Are The Best Methods Or Tools To Measure My Digital Marketing Results?

How you measure the success of your digital marketing campaigns will be dependent on the kind of marketing activities you do and the channels you use. 

The digital marketing statistics provided by each channel can be pulled through into analytics tools to help you to understand them, but the specific results you focus on might be different depending on which goals you’re trying to achieve.

• Social Media

  For social media, the metrics you’re most likely to analyse will be the number of impressions or clicks your posts get, new followers or profile views and your most popular posts.
  
  You can also look into things like engagement, to see how many people are actively interacting with what you share.
  
  This data can help you to see which kind of posts are most successful amongst your audience, so you can make sure you include more of that type in your ongoing social media content strategy.
  
  There are lots of social media management tools that you can use to schedule posts and monitor your engagement, but two of our favourites are Hubspot and Sprout Social.

• Paid Ads
  

  Paid ads can be run across a variety of different search engines, websites or networks. The ad platforms themselves, like Google Ads or Facebook Ads for example, usually provide you with all the information you need.
  
  The most important metrics to consider for paid ads are the impressions and clicks your ads have gained, the click-through rate (the percentage of people who saw your ads and clicked on them), the cost per click (how much it costs each time someone clicks on one of your ads) and your conversion rate (the percentage of people who clicked on your ads and went on to convert into customers or leads).
  
  There is plenty of other data to be found on paid ad platforms, but these will likely be your main focus.
  
  When evaluating the effectiveness of paid ads campaigns, you’ll be looking for a high click-through rate and conversion rate and a low cost per click.
  
  Paid ads usually require a lot of tweaking over time to figure out the best strategy, so don’t expect success with these metrics straight away.

• SEO

  Tools like Google Search Console and SEMrush are great for tracking the results of your SEO campaigns.
  
  You can see how the rankings of your targeted keywords have changed over time through keyword position tracking, check if you have any new backlinks or see the most popular pages on your website.
  
  You can also carry out a thorough SEO site audit to help you fix any technical issues on your website that would be hurting your ranking opportunities.
  
  If you’ve been working on optimising your website to include more instances of a particular keyword, and you can see that keyword position rising over time, you’d probably conclude that you’d been successful.
  
  It’s worth noting that results for SEO aren’t the easiest to track, as the impact of your work is not as immediate as it is for other channels, meaning it’s usually not possible to establish a clear cause and effect.
  
  Things like keyword rankings can also change at any time, regardless of what you do. Google algorithm updates are particularly well known for causing keywords to suddenly rise or drop, so it’s important to stay on top of when these are happening.

• Email Marketing

  Our preferred tool for putting together email marketing campaigns is Hubspot (we’re a Hubspot-certified partner).
  
  When you’re tracking the results of your email marketing campaigns, you might look for results such as how many people opened the email, how many people clicked on links or took a desired action.
  
  As an example, if you used A/B testing to see which of two subject lines encouraged more people to open your email, the metrics provided by tools like Hubspot will help you to determine which was more successful and therefore, which you should use going forward.

• Websites
  

  Via tools such as Google Analytics you can track things like the number of people who visit your website, the traffic sources that brought them there (such as whether they came from ads you’re running, from organic search or your social media profiles), and which devices the people who interact with your website use (these could be desktops, laptops, tablets or mobiles).
  
  Looking at the devices people use is especially helpful in terms of figuring out which version of your website to focus on when making design or development decisions.
  
  If 80% of your audience views your website on mobile devices, it’s time to make sure the mobile version of your site is fully optimised both visually and for speed.

• Putting It All Together

  Having a monthly overview of all of your channels in one place can be a really useful way to take a look at your overall marketing strategy.
  
  You can use a tool like Google Data Studio to pull together information from each of the channels you use into one easily digestible presentation - handy, right?

How Can I Use This Information Going Forward?

It’s important that you understand how to evaluate your marketing results as this will help you to figure out what’s not working, fix it and make consistent improvements to your digital marketing plan.

So, what’s next? Are you ready to conquer your data? Or are you terrified by metrics? Speak to our team for a consultation on how we can help you craft a bespoke marketing strategy, backed by research and data.