Digital Marketing Analytics: Measuring Your Campaign’s Success

If you’ve ever been to a marketing analysis meeting, you’re probably familiar with at least two measures of a campaign’s success. The most well-known metrics are leads and sales. But as we learn that marketing involves our ongoing relationship and communication with our current and potential consumers, we discover other measurable analytics, especially in the world of digital marketing.

Whatever your goals for your digital marketing efforts, it’s important to remember that you are not just building a company. In our highly connected environments, it’s vital to realize that you’re building a brand. Branding isn’t boiled down to a company logo. Brands have a look, a personality, and an essence that customers expect and feel when developing a relationship with a company and deciding their loyalty.

It may be hard to imagine how to measure a feeling or an emotional reaction, and it may be even harder to imagine how focusing on this aspect of your marketing will drive sales. But, when you think about your own favorite brands, you may find it difficult to put your finger on what it is that you love about your favorites.

What makes you buy your favorite brand when there are other options to choose from? What makes you like your favorite brand? It’s like trying to explain why your best friend is your favorite friend. They just are, right? It’s hard to explain, but you feel the difference. Developing your brand can make you an unexplainable favorite.

Branding like this needs a strategic plan. You need to communicate who you are, what you’re about, and why the consumer should care. Marketing is the execution of that planned communication and builds brand awareness. Given the digital era, we’re in for the foreseeable future, the most effective means of doing that is through digital marketing.

Digital marketing is a broader field than it used to be, and it offers one of the best features of a successful marketing campaign. Digital marketing, all of it, can be tracked with digital metrics, measured, and analyzed. If your digital marketing can be assessed, then so can your branding efforts. Who doesn’t love being able to see and measure their results?

Your business plan and goals will be the lead deciding factor in prioritizing which digital marketing metrics your brand focuses on. Of course, your marketing efforts also require budget consideration and doability for where you’re at right now. So, once you’ve done all this planning and executing, you want to know how to measure your campaign’s successes. Let’s get into it.

First, your goals need to be specific rather than vague. You don’t want to put time, money, and effort into your digital marketing and only be left saying, “I think we did pretty good.” You want to know if you achieved what you set out to do. Think specific, and you end up with something more like, “We increased our lunch sales on Tuesday afternoons by 20%.”

Next, you need to commit to a time frame. If you want an increase of, as in our example above, 20% in lunch sales on Tuesday afternoons, you need to know when to stop measuring and what timeframe you want to compare it to. An example of this would be committing to increasing for the month of March and evaluating it in comparison to last year’s March sales or maybe the previous month’s sales.

The difference-maker is that you’re not just indefinitely trying to vaguely do better. You’ll know that your efforts for the month of March had a measurable impact on a comparable timeframe. This timeframe setting helps motivate you by providing an end to shoot for, and you’ll know at the end if the effort is worth repeating or if a new approach is needed.

Real-life traffic may give you major anxiety, but that online traffic you see on your website can give you some seriously good vibes. Your website is your brand’s face, so regardless of what other digital marketing techniques you are employing, you’re trying to drive the traffic to this destination. You may have more specific goals under your other marketing channels, but your overarching goal is increasing overall website traffic over time.

It might help to think of this as a lot like predicting the weather. Through accurate data records, we know what to expect from the weather for any day based on what other days, just like it did in the past. Accurate overall website traffic data will help you forecast and check results.

This metric ties back to that leads and sales that we’re all familiar with. It’s one of our favorite metrics. Did that email blast result in more completed downloads? Did that Saturday morning text increase our customer volume and make actual sales? This metric, while it’s not the only metric, is a clear indication of success.