How Do You Evaluate A Digital Marketing Campaign?

Through Google Analytics - the most common answer.

In today’s post, I run through 9 easy ways to quantify your digital marketing success using Google Analytics for free.

A positive return on investment (ROI) is the most common objective of every single digital marketing campaign.

However, while the goal of digital marketing is to increase profits, not every campaign directly leads to revenue. Some campaigns raise awareness of your brand, while others might drive visitors to your website - but both help positively on ROI in the long run - some directly and some indirectly, but short-term results are to be difficult to quantify with monetary values.

This raises an important question: how do you know whether your digital marketing efforts are effective?

Here I’ll brief you about nine easy ways to quantify the success of your digital marketing campaigns.

But first let’s split the entire quantification technique into two categories: conversions and website behavior for easy understanding.

Conversions

Conversions happen when visitors or customers take specific actions as a result of your digital marketing effort. Unlike website behavior, conversions are more directly linked to sales transactions and revenues. Since your ultimate goal is increasing ROI, making sure your digital marketing converts is absolutely essential.

Here are five types of conversions that can indicate the success of a campaign:

#1 Online sales

Online sales from your website are imaginably the most common conversion for gauging success. Tracking and quantify your online sales is easy if you use Google Analytics or another Web analytics platform.

After installing a small snippet of code on your landing page, you’ll be able to see which of your campaigns are generating the most online sales. This is the simple yet most important conversion metric for strictly e-commerce business owners.

#2 Online-to-store sales

Not everyone who finds your business online will buy from your website straightaway all the time. Many local customers are likely to visit your store physically and make purchases. How do you measure these conversions?

Don’t worry as there are definitive ways to measure online-to-store sales.

For example, you can collect information from prospective customers on your website, such as email addresses, that can later be compared with data collected at the store’s cash register. Or, you can offer a special discount code on your website so when buyers redeem the discount you’ll be able to easily match it back to the marketing campaign. Or, you can just ask customers whether they found your business online and check how they found you – such as via a PPC ad, Facebook, or a Google search – and tally their answers to easily match it back to the marketing campaign. Then you can see which campaigns drive more in-store conversions.

#3 Leads from web forms

Most websites have contact forms that visitors can use to request services, schedule appointments, or get more information. If you’re using Google Analytics, you’ll be able to see which marketing campaigns result in the most use of your multiple web forms.

Any visitor who completes and submitted successfully a web form could later convert it into a customer. Therefore, marketing campaign success can be measured by the number of leads (web form submissions) generated.

#4 Leads and sales from phone calls

Tracking and measuring leads and sales from phone calls is also important for businesses that drive conversions via the phone.

To track calls, you’ll need to set up dynamic number insertion (DNI) call tracking feature, which shows visitor's unique phone numbers depending on how they arrived at your website. You can then view your phone logs (Phone Analytics and reporting are now available on Google Analytics) to see which campaigns result in the most call conversions.

#5 Leads from live chats

Does your website offer live chat for visitors? If yes, then you must consider taking it as another way to engage your visitors.

Once you have chat installed on your website, then you need to track which marketing campaigns are initiating the most chats. This can be done using the built-in tracking in your chatbot or by installing Google Analytics into your chat program. In both cases, you’ll be able to track which campaigns are driving more leads for your business via live chat.

Now that I’ve covered 5 ways to track and measure conversions from digital marketing, it’s time to move on to tracking how visitors behave on your landing pages. Just because a visitor doesn’t convert immediately, doesn’t mean s/he’s never going to. For that reason, it’s logical to look at other areas aside from conversions. We must also review website behavior metrics to measure digital marketing success because website behavior can often open the path for conversions.

Website Behavior

Here are four ways to prove digital marketing success based on website behavior:

#1 Website visits

This one is simple – which of your digital marketing campaigns are bringing the most traffic to your website? Although this is a rather shallow metric compared to any goal conversions, it’s still important to measure visits (users and sessions) per marketing channel.

This is especially helpful when you do an assessment of traffic trends over time. For example, you’ll want to measure traffic from the Organic Search channel periodically so you validate if your SEO efforts are working or not. Plus, you’ll be able to detect potential problems early on if you see a sudden drop in organic traffic.

#2 Page views per visit

Website visits are important, but they don’t really specify whether visitors are engaged by your business (with your content on the landing pages). What if nobody (or only a few) who visits your website clicks around to your various products and pages?

Fortunately, Google Analytics can show you how visitors click through your site while also providing average numbers of page views per visit in addition to information associated with the bounce rate and exit rate.

Pay close attention to which web pages your customers are visiting most, how long they are staying on a page, and how many pages they are browsing during that visit. You might find that online customers are more attracted to certain discount offers or specific products in your inventory. If you’re promoting your blog, you can also get ideas about the topics your visitors find most interactive.

#3 Time spent on the website

How much time are people spending on your blog or website during a visit, and which of your digital marketing campaigns is driving in the most engaged visitors?

Google Analytics can track this, too. Again, time spent on your website doesn’t directly lead to sales always, but visitors who spend more time browsing have found your website interesting are more likely to come back later and buy.

#4 Bounce rate

In the world of digital marketing, a high bounce rate can be severe for several reasons.

If any of your campaigns have high bounce rates – meaning people are leaving as soon as they land on your web page — then there’s probably a serious disconnection between your marketing strategy and your landing page. Some search engines might interpret websites with high bounce rates as low-quality or spam, resulting in a penalty in form of a drop in keywords rank on SERP.

The point to remember is, a high bounce rate on the landing page is good because it shows that people are moving from it to other pages on your website. Whereas a high exit rate for that same landing page is a signal that something more serious is going on with your website, and more specifically, with your sales or conversion funnel.

Use Google Analytics to measure your bounce rate over time to spot trends in each of your marketing campaigns and their effectiveness too.

Conclusion

Knowing how to track and measure the success of your digital marketing campaigns will save you a lot of stress down the road. You won’t need to guess whether you’re wasting your time and resources with various campaigns. You can stop or pause campaigns that aren’t working, or you can optimize campaigns to really focus attention on your goals.

And one more thing — always set KPIs – means know how you’ll measure a campaign’s success before you create and then launch it. Yes, this requires a more thoughtfully constructed plan for your marketing efforts, but you should never start a digital marketing campaign that doesn’t have a specific objective.

Plan ahead, set sight at your target to achieve, and you’re more likely to stay profitable when measuring the success of campaigns.