Tools for Measuring Marketing Success Today I’m going to talk about measuring a marketing campaigns success. The act of marketing is expensive. It can cost a lot of money to run ads and raise awareness and it can cost a lot in time effort and energy. That’s why it is so important to track and […]
Tools for Measuring Marketing Success
Today I’m going to talk about measuring a marketing campaigns success. The act of marketing is expensive. It can cost a lot of money to run ads and raise awareness and it can cost a lot in time effort and energy. That’s why it is so important to track and measure your campaigns kpis or key performance indicators. These are the goals that you set up to indicate if your campaigns is working. Chances are you’ll be doing multiple things to raise awareness for your campaign. If you track your campaign properly you should know what worked and what didn’t. This way the next campaign will be cheaper and more effective because you’ll know what to do and what to avoid. In the end this will save you both time and money and get you the success you wanted.
Understanding what success is can be hard. Success is really about reaching a well defined goal. The more simple the goal the better. Some simple goals might be “getting users to visit a web page”, “getting users to fill out a survey”, or maybe “getting a user to place an order”.
A goal can have a sliding scale – that’s good because it can help us measure against other goals.
Example:
Write a blog article
Goal: get traffic to that article
We will look at the actions you might take to drive traffic to the article as well as the tools you could use to track its success.
The process for marketing the article will be to:
* setting the goals for the campaign
* Setting actions and deliverables
* Define the metrics for success on the Campaign as well as each Action executing those actions
* Monitoring results of actions
* Analysing results of the actions against the metrics
* Knowledge Share – figure out what was worth it and find ways to capitalize on what worked and remove resources from what doesn’t
Goals
Our Metric for success might be 2000 pageviews to the article’s URL. We may have additional metrics to judge each action’s success too. At this point though let’s talk about the marketing actions and deliverables we are going to execute in order to reach our goal of 2000 pageviews
Campaign Goal: 2000 pageviews of the article
Example: All actions should result in getting traffic to a blog article
Actions:
* Make an appealing graphic
* Create a short description for Article with enticing text
* Use Goo.gl to setup your link
* Post link to article on Twitter
* Post link to article on Facebook
* Post link to article on Pinterest
* Post link to Google Plus Communities
* Post link on Reddit
* Set up ad words campaign for article
* Monitor Each Channel’s Results
* Use Goo.gl shortener to see your link clicks in action (high level)
* Use google analytics to see traffic results to your article
After you have mapped out all of your actions and deliverables for the campaign you can assign your subset of metrics for measuring success. If the overall campaign goal was 2000 total pageviews it might be good to take that total and divide it by each traffic driving channel – for example if you post links on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and Google plus you could make a goal of 500 clicks for each channel. If you get more then it is a success, but more importantly if the channel underperforms you will have a way of identifying problem areas – and hopefully avoid the same pitfalls in the future.
The tools to measure our campaign
Google Analytics, Goo.gl Url Shortener, and Google Webmaster tools
Goo.gl URL Shortener (The first 24 hrs)
* goo.gl for shorting URLs and seeing clicks in realtime
* Other URL Shorteners
* bitly.com
* bit.
Tools for Measuring Marketing Success
Today I’m going to talk about measuring a marketing campaigns success. The act of marketing is expensive. It can cost a lot of money to run ads and raise awareness and it can cost a lot in time effort and energy. That’s why it is so important to track and measure your campaigns kpis or key performance indicators. These are the goals that you set up to indicate if your campaigns is working. Chances are you’ll be doing multiple things to raise awareness for your campaign. If you track your campaign properly you should know what worked and what didn’t. This way the next campaign will be cheaper and more effective because you’ll know what to do and what to avoid. In the end this will save you both time and money and get you the success you wanted.
Understanding what success is can be hard. Success is really about reaching a well defined goal. The more simple the goal the better. Some simple goals might be “getting users to visit a web page”, “getting users to fill out a survey”, or maybe “getting a user to place an order”.
A goal can have a sliding scale – that’s good because it can help us measure against other goals.
Example:
Write a blog article
Goal: get traffic to that article
We will look at the actions you might take to drive traffic to the article as well as the tools you could use to track its success.
The process for marketing the article will be to:
Our Metric for success might be 2000 pageviews to the article’s URL. We may have additional metrics to judge each action’s success too. At this point though let’s talk about the marketing actions and deliverables we are going to execute in order to reach our goal of 2000 pageviews
Campaign Goal: 2000 pageviews of the article
Example: All actions should result in getting traffic to a blog article
Actions:
After you have mapped out all of your actions and deliverables for the campaign you can assign your subset of metrics for measuring success. If the overall campaign goal was 2000 total pageviews it might be good to take that total and divide it by each traffic driving channel – for example if you post links on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and Google plus you could make a goal of 500 clicks for each channel. If you get more then it is a success, but more importantly if the channel underperforms you will have a way of identifying problem areas – and hopefully avoid the same pitfalls in the future.
Google Analytics, Goo.gl Url Shortener, and Google Webmaster tools
Goo.gl URL Shortener (The first 24 hrs)
In Google Analytics (The first Week)
If you have analytics set up in your site there are some sections you should be interested in with regards to your content. The two main sections I look at most is the site content break down under the Behavior section and the social media traffic break down under the Acquisitions section.
google webmaster tools (The first Month and beyond)
Webmaster Tools are there to help you monitor the health of your site. It will give you the ability to check for broken links, errors on pages, and an overall view of the health of your site. It also gives you information on inbound links, search queries and other tools for analyzing how users get to your site. For the monitoring the success of your campaign you should use Google Webmaster tools to take note of any errors or issues on your site. Webmaster tools aren’t as directly important to this specific campaign, but it still is good to identify issues users might have with the content and functionality of your site.
With Google Webmaster Tools You can see:
Social Media Analytics (First Week and Beyond)
These set of analytic tools are housed on each Social Network. They will give you as sense of how your content is performing on the network. These tools should be used to help you realize what types of content do well and give you an idea of how to make your content more engaging and perform better. For example, if your posts with pictures do better than posts without pictures, it would make sense to start posting pictures with each of your posts.
You can really go over board with tracking, but at the end of the day you’ll get a better picture of how your campaign is doing. You can usually get away with just using Google analytics, but using the URL shortener for tracking for clicks can help you get a more immediate picture of how your promotions are working. This is about finding out where to cut the fat – not how to add hours of analysis.
Keep in mind that analytics just keep track of your site – it doesn’t make your content good, it doesn’t sell products, it doesn’t do anything but keep track of what is going on within a web property. They let you know what people are looking at – how they got there – and how long they spent looking at it. You can also find out things about your audience – what kind of technology they are accessing your site with – where they are in the world – where they were before they came to your site. Analytics are there to help you understand your audience, and we use analytics to see how our marketing efforts pan out.
Knowledge Share
What good is all this extra work if it doesn’t teach you something? As you are analyzing your data be sure to track your successes and your failures. Take note of the differences, and if there aren’t any differences then try to figure out why it was a success on one channel and failure on another. One thing to keep in mind is that each Social Network has a type: Facebook is the mall, whereas twitter is a gas station. Instagram is a photo album while Pinterest is a shopping catalogue. They are all different, so don’t be surprised if the same message doesn’t work for each channel.
As you go through all of your data and dissect what worked and what didn’t try to make up hypothesis that you can test out with your next campaign. It is always important to learn and put those lessons to practice.
