6 Ways to Measure the Success of Your Marketing Campaign

Companies both small and big have access to the world’s most influential marketing tool: the internet. The web helps level the playing field, giving advantages to companies who know how to use it. A small business with a tiny marketing budget, but a successful marketing campaign can outshine its much wealthier competitor.

The average business spends 12-13% of their revenue on marketing. A single marketing campaign can influence millions of people around the world. If done effectively, you can enjoy significant ROI from that campaign.

But how can you measure if your marketing campaign is successful? What qualitative and quantitative data do you need to determine whether the value of money and time you spent on this campaign was worth it?

Here are 6 ways to determine exactly that:

 

Goal Setting for Your Marketing Campaign

 
 

Before launching your successful marketing campaign, create a list of goals for yourself or with your team. How many impressions are you seeking to make, and how many leads would you like to generate? Are you looking for an increase in revenue, and if so, by how much?

Make sure you are setting tangible, attainable goals for yourself. Keep your expectations high, but be realistic. First-time actors aren’t expecting to win an Oscar. They’re just hoping to land a second, more promising gig. Your success measurement should be in terms of you, not Apple, Starbucks, or Walmart.

With a list of tangible goals in mind, it’s time to check out your quantitative data.

 

Keywords and Domain Ranking

You can use Google Analytics or any comparable search engine marketing tool to analyze your site’s traffic to determine where you were before and after the campaign. There are four types of web traffic: organic, social, referral, and direct.

  • Organic – Organic traffic comes from unpaid listing on search engines and directories, like when you type keywords into a search bar, and a link comes up.
  • Social – Social traffic refers to traffic coming from your social media platforms or networks.
  • Referral – Referral traffic is measured by link building, or when someone visits your site after being on a different site.
  • Direct – Direct traffic is most commonly the result of someone physically typing in the URL to your site, or by clicking an untagged link from an email or on a Word or PDF document.

Analyzing the web traffic you had before and after a marketing campaign will show you how influential your campaign was on all four of these different avenues. You can also input your domain and see the total change in traffic. This will further help you measure your success.

 

Analyzing Web Traffic

Google Analytics also allows you to figure out how many new and return visitors you have. Google Analytics also allows you to track your visitors by demographic.

You can track new vs. returning visitors under the audience > behavior tab on Google Analytics. This information won’t be 100% accurate, because the same new user can access your site on their mobile device, laptop, and tablet (and if they clear their cookies, they are considered a new user again). Still, it’s a helpful source to determine if your marketing campaign is influencing new people. Return visitors are people who have already accessed your site and are browsing it again.

New users can you help determine if your social and referral traffic works. Odds are most of your new users are coming from one of those two sources. If you don’t see a significant increase in new user traffic, you will want to rethink your marketing strategy for future campaigns.

You can also find demographics under the audience tab. All these can be important, depending on which demographics your campaign hopes to influence.

 

Links

Links built and inbound links are measured on Moz’s link explorer. The number and quality of links you have will increase your domain authority score. This makes it easier for people to find you organically.

Off-site content strategy can play a significant role in your marketing campaign. According to Forbes, any link you embed in your content will pass authority to your site. Using Moz’s link explorer, you can determine how many links you’ve built and how effective they are.

Inbound links are also relevant. The more times your site is linked as a point of reference, the higher your domain authority will rise. Moz’s link explorer allows you to identify a site’s influence and the inbound links to a page. It also helps you with several other analytics that could be useful in your marketing campaign.

 

Social Media

Social media offers several other ways to analyze the effectiveness of a marketing campaign. You can track the number of new followers you acquired on platforms like Facebook and Instagram. You can also view the levels of engagement on each of your posts.

Social media traffic also allows you to determine how many new email and website subscribers you have after running a campaign. All this information will help you decide whether you ran a successful marketing campaign.

 

Value of Time and Money

The final way to analyze a marketing campaign is to determine how much time and money you spent on it, and whether it was worth it. Keep a spreadsheet that lists all your advertising costs, including labor, to get an estimate of how much you budgeted for this campaign. Also, make sure you kept track of how much time you spent on this endeavor. What other projects or opportunities could you have been exploring instead of working on a marketing campaign?

Upon its conclusion, while you analyze your links, web traffic, social media, keywords, and domain authority, use this spreadsheet and compare it with the results. Compare it against your initial goal and decide whether you ran a successful marketing campaign.

 

The Importance of Marketing Campaigns

Businesses that don’t market themselves get lost in the Google algorithm abyss. Their websites predate the 2016 election, their links are dead, and their only social media link is to their MySpace account. Your campaigns won’t always be as lucrative or rewarding as you want them to be. However, with each attempt, you’ll better understand how to improve and prepare for future campaigns. If your marketing campaign beats out larger, more profitable competitors, you know you’re on the right track.

How do you measure your marketing campaigns, and what has worked for you in the past? Leave a comment below.