If you plan on investing in digital marketing, it’s important to know how to measure your marketing campaign effectiveness. If your marketing campaign works great, you’ll want to know so you can recreate your success! So, how do you check the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and compare it with your expectations? That’s the topic of this article.

Your digital marketing ventures can range from managing a social media handle to running a full-fledged Facebook ad campaign. By evaluating your marketing campaign efforts, you’ll be able to channel your resources toward the most fruitful marketing options.

If you have jumped into different platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, and YouTube, to shout about your business, you can use campaign analytics to analyze the effectiveness of your efforts. But that’s only a piece of the puzzle. The following tips will help you evaluate your marketing campaign efforts to optimize performance no matter where you are marketing.

Understand the Requirements and Targets of Your Marketing Campaign

To analyze the outreach of your marketing campaign, you must identify the target—who you are trying to reach. You also want to understand your baseline numbers to see if the campaign has a measurable impact. Here are some questions you’ll want to answer:

• Is the campaign bringing in more organic traffic? (Compare your average inbound visitors to the organic traffic you have received since the campaign launch.)
• How many social shares did my campaign posts get? Is it an increase from the number of shares my posts normally get?
• What is the size of my follower base? How much has it grown during the marketing campaign?
• What is the outreach of my brand on social media platforms? Have things improved since the campaign launch?
• How are the reviews on sites like Google or Yelp? Have you seen any improvement in the number of reviews or user ratings since the campaign?
• What are the conversion rates? What is the cost per sale?

Once you find these answers, you can compare this information with your previous set of data and goals. If the pre-defined goals were realistic, but your campaign didn’t make a comparative effect, you can run an informative diagnostic check to find the shortcomings of your marketing efforts.

Using current and past data, create benchmarks for future campaigns. Start with your Google Analytics and use all available statistics to predict how your online presence may be improved. Once you understand your web visitors, their ideal content, and their bounce rates, you can use this information to promote your products and landing pages.

In addition, you’ll want to continually understand and reevaluate your customers. When you started your campaign, you took notice of your audience’s demographics and curated a campaign to target that audience. But this is a continuous process. You’ll want to keep an eye on customer statistics to know who is responding to your message and find effective ways to reach them. 

Examine Your Digital Presence

Part of measuring your marketing campaign efforts is consistently tracking the statistics of your web presence. You need to know how well your website performs compared to your competitors. This process involves reviewing your search engine ranking, social media channels, SEO, and website metrics.

Step 1: Know Your Search Engine Ranking

Search engine rank indicates how important the search engines think your website is and what type of content attracts visitors. Your goal should be to get your business to rank on the first three search results because these results get the most clicks. Being found through search will bring organic traffic to your site. Knowing your page rank for keywords you want to be known for is important because it indicates the number of hits your page will get from search engines. 

Step 2: Assess Your Social Media Presence 

Ask yourself the following questions:

1. Which social media channel(s) is my business using (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, Instagram, TikTok, or others)?
2. How frequently do I post on my business social media channel(s)?
3. What is the interaction level with my posts? Likes, comments, shares, followers, etc.
4. Have any potential clients engaged with my business on social media to get information on or to purchase my products or services?

Bonus Tip: You can also use Facebook page ranking to compare your business to competitors on Facebook within the same industry. 

Step 3: Compare Organic Search Rankings

To understand how your website SEO is doing compared to your competitors, follow these steps:

1. Search your business name on Google to find which page it appears on and what number in the search results.
2. Search for the product or service your business provides to see if the search is returning your company name (and on which page/what number result).
3. Do the same using a keyword search that includes your industry and location.

Now you need to compare your results to your competitors. The best tool for this is SEMrush.com, where you can track your ranking of SEO performance compared to your competitors. SpyFu.com is also a good tool for finding your competitor’s keywords and behavior.

Step 4: Know Your Website Metrics

Use free website analytics tools like Google Analytics to learn the number of website visits to receive, the bounce rate (or time spent on the website), most visited pages, new visitors compared to returning visitors, and other metrics. For help, check out Score’s The Practical Google Analytics Guide for Small Businesses. 

Measuring the ROI of Your Marketing Campaign Efforts

One of the most important ways to measure a marketing campaign is its performance and profit. By measuring return on investment (ROI), you can determine whether or not your marketing efforts are helping to improve your bottom line. 

Before calculating everything based on conversions, remember that building a digital presence gives your brand a platform to communicate with customers. You can set the narrative on who you are as a brand and set yourself apart from competitors. More than just your website, your digital presence expands to all the touch points a customer may have with your brand online. When building a relationship online, you may need 7 to as many as 30 touchpoints with the customer before gaining traction. There’s a lot of noise in the marketplace. Therefore, the impact of specific marketing campaign efforts and your overall digital presence can be hard to quantify.

There are several ways to calculate ROI for a marketing campaign. The core formula used to understand the impact at a high level is relatively straightforward:

It’s important to note that this formula assumes that all sales growth is tied to your marketing campaign. Marketers should account for organic sales to generate a more realistic view of marketing impact and ROI.

The rule of thumb for marketing ROI is that you’re typically looking for a 5:1 ratio of returns compared to costs, with 10:1 being exceptional. Anything below a 2:1 ratio is considered unprofitable because when you factor in the costs to produce and distribute goods/services, you may break even.

When leveraging marketing ROI formulas, it’s also important to understand the total your marketing efforts have generated.  Conversions do not necessarily mean sales. Brand awareness is also an important part of marketing.

The whole aim of a digital marketing return analysis is to find the most rewarding source of traffic from your best marketing campaigns. This will help you streamline your marketing resources to focus on the most favorable and cost-effective marketing option(s).

When it comes to marketing, there’s a big difference between getting your name out there and driving leads, and closing sales. Brand awareness is the first step, and it’s important, but it’s hard to quantify. Your marketing campaign ‘conversions’ might be likes and comments at first, not sales. Take the time to build trust with your target customers to earn the right to pitch to them. 

Make sure to engage in marketing activities that build your brand, drive leads, build your email list, and close sales. Don’t spend money on trade shows or conferences unless your target customer makes up 85-90 percent of the attendees. Don’t ever do any advertising that you can’t measure. If you want to hire someone to help you with online ads, check their references and results first. And remember to refer back to this post whenever you want to try something new. Measuring your marketing campaign efforts can be tricky, but it’s worth it. Once you find the best marketing strategies for your business, you can fine-tune them to bring in even more customers and sales.