5 Tips for Analyzing the Success of a Marketing Campaign
If you or your company is investing time, research, money, and more into a marketing campaign, you will want to ensure that it was effective and successful. Analyzing a marketing campaign is crucial to ensure that success and to arm yourself with the knowledge to amplify the success of future campaigns. To help you properly analyze your next marketing campaign, we have compiled 5 tips that you should follow.
Establish your goals, KPIs, and more prior to the campaign
Part of building a marketing campaign is to first have clear goals, key performance indicators or KPIs, metrics you are looking to hit, and more. Unless you know what you or your company is looking to achieve with a campaign, there will be no way to measure its success and impact. Are you looking to increase web lift? Are you looking to increase sales? Are you looking for a specific return on your investment in this campaign? Establish the answers to some of these questions as well as specific numbers. Be as specific as, you are looking for a 25% return on your campaign investment or you would like to see a 10% lift in visitors to your website throughout the duration of the campaign. Be clear and be specific with these expectations and how they will be measured which will be re-visited when you are looking at the results from your campaign.
Track the campaign throughout its duration
There are many ways to track the pieces of a marketing campaign and it is important to do so in order to properly measure the results and success. It is now easier than ever to put a partnership tracker in place to accurately track partners across various platforms and in a reliable manner, attribute performance and vital information that will be useful when measuring campaign success. Tracking various aspects of a campaign will allow analysis to be done much more effectively through the reporting and data provided.
Dive into and examine the results
Once you have run your marketing campaign and have received any tracking and data, you will want to dive right into this information and compare the results to the goals, KPIs, and metrics that you set prior to its start. Now, you will be able to see if these results and data have hit or exceeded your set expectations and will be able to determine the level of campaign success. Smart Insights offers some useful best practices to take into consideration when examining these results and how to use the data collected during the campaign to optimize and improve in the future.
Use and compare prior campaign data
If you have previously run marketing campaigns, you may have data and results that would be useful to take look at prior to the planning and beginning of another campaign. You should use information such as, which tactics performed well and which did not have a large impact, performance in various time periods, which creative pieces resulted in the most engagement or success. The tracking and data from the campaign you are looking to implement should also be kept and examined in order to better structure your campaigns in the future. Running A/B tests when implementing marketing campaigns, especially in the beginning, is a great way to get a clear idea of future direction through comparing the tracking and results measured for each.
Bring in a professional
If this is your first marketing campaign or you are uncertain as to whether you or your team is properly equipped to analyze the campaign results and determine whether it was successful or could use some improvement, it can always help to bring in a professional. You can look into companies or individual marketing specialists that have experience in your specific industry and would have insight that could be beneficial and even may have some experience with your competitors. A professional could be brought in early in the process to assist with determining your goals, KPIs, and metrics, and oversee the whole campaign process could be brought in just to give an analysis of the results, tracking, and data.
Use these 5 tips to analyze the success of your marketing campaign and ensure effectiveness as well as even more success in the future!
SEO Monitoring: How to Track Your SEO Progress
Many strategies help to ensure business growth. SEO, content marketing, social media marketing, email marketing, and many more. Each of these strategies requires a budget amongst other resources to produce results. A business needs to devote time, personnel, skills, and many others during a campaign and certain metrics will be used to measure the campaign success. These metrics are known as Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and KPIs help companies to save time and money.
Search Engine Optimization is one of the most efficient digital strategies that a company can implement to attract organic traffic and increase visibility. As a business owner, here are five ways that you can track or monitor your SEO progress.
- Organic Traffic: The first way to know if your SEO strategy has been effective so far is to check the number of organic traffic that your website is getting. By organic traffic, it means the number of curious internet users who searched for something and clicked on your website because it appeared on the search result page. Organic traffic is proof that you have been able to identify your target audience, you know what they are searching for, and you have been able to use the right keywords to provide valuable information for them. The more organic traffic that you get on your website, the more certain you are that your SEO strategy is working.
- Keywords: A keyword could be a single word and it could be a phrase. When you search for a term on a search engine, your input is a keyword. As a business owner, you want to find specific keywords that your target audience will use to access search engines. These keywords will be used in your website optimization to make your page rank highly among search results. Research has shown that over 25% of people click on the first results when they search for a term on Google. The goal of your SEO strategy is to make sure that you rank on the first page of a search engine (possibly the first). To do this, you can search for keywords that your target audience will use and see the ranking position of your website
- Website Scraping: Another way to track your SEO progress is to check the website of your competitors to find how and why they are doing well, or better than you. You can deploy bots to go through the website of your competitors to analyze their SEO performance. These bots will feed you information like keywords, tags, headers, and other metrics that your competitors use to rank higher on search engines. This strategy is very helpful to understand the SEO strategy of your competitors and devise a way to perform better. However, your competitors and search engines will frown at this. No business wants their secret exposed and search engines do not appreciate using stolen data to increase your performance. If either the search engine or your competitor manages to sniff your bots, the bots will be blocked immediately. But you can use residential proxies to parse any website without being caught. Residential proxies allow you to access the web using local IP addresses assigned to household users. Businesses make use of residential proxies to gather information, test their strategy against their competitors' strategy, and perform geo-based SEO audits. You can conduct for instance an SEO audit in London with the help of tools or professional agencies.
- Click-Through Rate (CTR): Your click-through rate represents the percentage of people who visited your website compared in contrast with the number of times the website appeared in a search result. If your website appears in 10 search results in a day and was visited two out of these ten times, then your click-through rate for that day would be 20%. Lower click-through rates suggest that you should make changes to the content of your website - meta descriptions, title tags, formatting, and so on. You can check your click-through rate by checking your search analytics on your Google Search Console.
- Bounce Rate: When internet users visit a website, they typically scroll through the website to determine if the information they need is on the website. If they find the kind of content that they are looking for, they stay on the site and if they don't, they leave. Your bounce rate allows you to know how many people actually visited or just interacted with your website. An interaction occurs when a user does not spend time on a website. Low bounce rates signify that you should improve in metrics like your lead magnet or website layout.
Monitoring your SEO progress is very essential to know how effective your strategy is, find out what is and what is not working, and formulate better development strategies. A business can save part of its budget by monitoring its SEO progress and fixing any errors as soon as possible.