Measuring a marketing campaign’s overall performance and ROI is essential for improving marketing materials and gaining new customers. The only way for a business to understand how and where it can improve its marketing efforts is by tracking ROI and performance.
Importance of Campaign Data
If your company does business in a competitive industry or market, the advertising campaigns you pursue will dictate how successful your company is. Spending a considerable amount of your budget on marketing effectively appeals to current and prospective customers alike. However, creating an effective campaign that delivers the necessary results depends on the marketing techniques. If you spend a considerable sum of money on a poorly done marketing campaign, you’ll waste both time and money.
Since there are numerous ways to perform marketing for your company, there are also an array of techniques you can use to track the return on your investment. The returns you obtain can differ depending on the goal of your marketing materials. For instance, your returns may come from an increase in brand perception or brand awareness. Identifying every return on your investment helps you create a much stronger campaign that considers every company’s needs.
There are many fantastic methods that allow you to track marketing. Here are five tracking techniques that should benefit any company that uses them.
Use Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a robust platform that allows users to track many different marketing and SEO metrics. This tool simplifies the process of gathering the necessary data needed to create the necessary reports needed to better track ROI. These include tracking website visitors, referrals, and how users interact with various landing pages.
While Google Analytics assists in tracking all types of marketing, this tool centers around social media marketing and content marketing. Your returns come from higher brand awareness and traffic when you perform content marketing. Consider tracking the pieces of content that generate the highest amount of traffic. Examining the data you receive from Google Analytics allows you to determine which ads perform the best.
Develop a Custom Social Analytics Dashboard
Consider tracking the performance of your social media marketing campaigns by developing a custom social analytics dashboard. Track dozens of different metrics, all from a single location. When measuring ROI, social media marketing is among the most challenging types of marketing to measure. Even though LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter provide some straightforward analytics, turning these analytics into actionable data is difficult.
For instance, LinkedIn allows you to identify the amount of engagement a single post gets. However, a high amount of engagement doesn’t necessarily correlate with more traffic or sales. To create an analytics dashboard for your social media marketing, there are five basic steps to follow. These steps include:
- Set your social media goals and objectives
- Use a reporting tool to build a custom dashboard
- Create a social media dashboard
- Add widgets for every social media channel
- Add or remove metrics as needed
Some of the top metrics to track with this dashboard include the number of comments, social bookmarks, media engagement, and share of conversation.
Offer Surveys to Site Visitors
Users who visit your website aren’t going to take an ample amount of time to answer lengthy surveys. However, it’s possible to engage site visitors with micro surveys. These surveys typically contain around 1-3 questions and take seconds to answer. Once you properly implement these surveys, you’ll have the opportunity to collect data from the responses.
ROI measurements in the form of consumer perception and brand awareness are made easy with micro surveys. These questionnaires display themselves as small and non-intrusive popups. Besides obtaining valuable data that allows you to track and measure ROI, implementing micro surveys into your website is affordable. The most effective micro surveys are ones that ask for ratings on a scale of 1-10. The results from these surveys should be simple to measure.
Properly Segment Audiences for More Specific Data
Obtaining the necessary information for your campaigns is sometimes made easier by segmenting your main audience into several smaller audiences.
Let’s say that a piece of marketing you put online has a conversion rate that amounts to 10%. However, breaking down data into smaller segments could show you that older members of your audience don’t respond well to these marketing materials. At the same time, you might learn that younger individuals from 18 to 25 produce the most conversions.
The most common forms of market segmentation include demographics, geographic, psychographics, and behavioral. The data you receive after segmenting audiences should be considerably more actionable.
Implement Form Tracking
Forms are a window into the interest that potential customers have in your brand and business. Implementing forms into your website design allows you to track numerous metrics that would otherwise be difficult to obtain. Both Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager offer tools for tracking forms that you place on your website. With these tools, you can track:
- Prefilling form fields
- Form submissions
- Pulling data from form fields
Using form tools such as Zoho Forms or Gravity Forms can even track the UTM data sent from various campaigns even further.
These methods are just a few suggestions of many different ways to help gather the necessary data needed to determine your ROI allowing you to see what works and doesn’t work when it comes to generating new leads.
