Effective marketing comes down to finding ways to connect with your audience in a way that’s most convenient to them. It’s about meeting them where they’re at. In this day and age, that means taking your marketing campaigns to online channels. When developing your strategy, it’s important to track certain metrics to measure the overall effectiveness of your digital campaigns.
Sure, you could push out digital ads or engage in digital outreach all day and simply hope for the best. But it would be impossible to know whether anything you’ve done was actually effective without setting some kind of metrics to measure your success. When you start building your strategy, you need to determine which key performance indicators (KPIs) you want to measure. An effective strategy should outline what, when, and how to measure those KPIs. This will help ensure that your digital campaigns actually support your overall business goals.
Here are a few of the most common key performance indicators that will help you best measure the success of your digital campaign:
Traffic and Bounce Rate
Put simply, traffic data reveals the number of users who visit your website or landing page during a set period of time. Traffic to your site should increase throughout the duration of your digital campaign, if it is working effectively. You should look at overall traffic as well as organic search traffic so that you can understand how many users are finding your website or landing page solely based on relevant search queries.
Bounce rate on the other hand shows you the percentage of users who end up leaving your site after only viewing a single page. The goal is to keep this percentage under 50%. Anything over suggests that there is some sort of obstacle or confusion in your digital ad that is preventing users from proceeding through to conversion.
Click-Through Rate
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that you want users to click on your digital ad. Evaluating your ad’s click-through rate (CTR) tells you how many people clicked on your content to visit the associated landing page. If the CTR is high, you can safely conclude that your ad offers relevant and interesting content to your target audience. If it’s low, then you may want to rethink the copy or overall look and feel of the ad.
Conversions Generated From Your Digital Campaigns
High web traffic or click-through rates are great, but they don’t mean much if they don’t generate actual conversions. The goal of your digital campaign is to get a user to take a particular action. Whether that be contacting you, signing up for something, making a purchase, or downloading a particular resource. If you find that your conversion rates are low when traffic and other such metrics are high, you may need to evaluate things like copy, visual presentation, overall user experience, or even optimizing the calls-to-actions themselves.
Qualified Leads
Another KPI to keep in mind is the amount of qualified leads that come into your business. Sometimes, leads aren’t directly linked to any particular channel or ad. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that leads aren’t coming in as result of your campaign. Some users may take notice of your campaign and take action later, or move to a different channel to take action. So it is important to keep track of the total number of new leads that come in throughout the duration of your digital campaign.
Sales Revenue
Sales revenue may seem like an obvious metric to track. A business should always evaluate its overall sales revenue to ensure they are offering value to their target audience. It’s also a crucial metric in determining the success of your digital campaign. Your sales revenue should increase throughout your campaign. If it’s not, or if there is any decrease, that suggests that you may need to change your strategy.
These are by no means the only metrics you can track for your digital campaigns. If your campaign is primarily through social media, you’ll want to also track social media engagement. Or if you are using mainly email methods, you’ll need to look at email open rate. The metrics you track will depend on your specific campaign and goals.
It’s also important to note that none of these metrics should be measured in isolation. To gain a more accurate understanding of your campaign’s overall performance, you need to look at several metrics together. This will help paint a better picture of what is and is not working, so you can make adjustments wherever necessary.