In my mind, the days of just putting some banner ads out and seeing what happens ended a long time ago. Long gone are the days where agencies could get away with just telling you that you don’t need to worry about the numbers, that this new online campaign will be “really cool,” and that you should trust them. But in many cases, it still feels like companies aren’t taking the time to define how they will measure whether their campaign was successful. In order to do that, you need to define what type of campaign you are running, what constitutes success, and how you will actually measure, before you actually launch the campaign.
What type of campaign are you are running?
Before deciding how you will measure the success of your campaign you need decide what type of campaign you are running. Normally this means deciding whether you are focusing on driving leads or visitors to your site, or if you focusing on building brand awareness. Once you have made this decision, you can then decide what success will look like and how you can measure it.
What constitutes success?
Are you trying to increase purchases on your site, grow your email list, get people to fill out a form, get more subscribers to your blog, or just become aware your company and the products or services you sell? As a marketer, you must define what the goals of your campaign are before you launch it. You also need to be focused on a few specific goals and not spread yourself too thin. You can’t expect to launch a campaign with the goal of increasing purchases, getting new email subscribers, and increasing blog subscribers. Those are three very different goals that will require very different tactics to achieve and in the end you may only be successful in reaching one of those goals (and possibly none).
How do you measure it?
You have decided on what type of campaign to run, you have determined what your success looks like, and now it is time to apply specific metrics and numbers so you can truly measure whether this campaign worked. Your particular metrics are going to be specific to your business: it could be a certain percentage increase in online sales, a particular number of leads at a particular cost per lead (CPL), or users downloading a particular piece of content a certain number of times. Whatever those particular numbers are for your business, you need to define those up front, and when the campaign ends, look at those numbers, look at your results, and determine success.
How do you track it all?
Setting up success metrics will be all for naught if you can’t actually track results. So what do you track? That’s easy: you track everything! If you are already using a tool like Universal Analytics or Adobe Analytics you are in good shape: you are already tracking what happens on your site, where visitors are coming from, and what they are doing. If you are launching a digital campaign through an agency or Google Display Network, you will be using their ad server to actually track the success of your marketing creative. The key here is to tie those two pieces of data together, which typically means adding a line of code or a tracking pixel (generated from the ad server) that will tell you exactly what someone who clicked on an ad did on your site, which lets you truly measure success. One thing you need to also make sure you are tracking are phone calls. If your goal is to increase leads and someone comes to your site, and instead of filling out a form, decides to call, you want to make sure that lead is attributed to your digital campaign. Using something like DialogTech’s SourceTrak allows you to attribute all your calls to the source that drove them so you truly measure success.
Answering these simple questions before you launch any kind of marketing campaign will allow you to answer the first and most important question you will get asked when the campaign ends: “Did it work?”