There are numerous variables to marketing campaigns, which is why the outcome of your marketing campaign can vary greatly. So, how do you evaluate its success?
The secret is Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). They can provide you with the needed information to enhance your marketing tactics. So, keep reading to learn how to measure the success of your marketing campaign and which KPIs to use.
Measure the Success of Your Marketing Campaign in 3 Steps
Without further ado, here’s a guide to the steps you need to take.
1. Set Appropriate Goals
To measure the success of your campaign, you need a SMART goal. That’s an acronym for:
- Specific: Define your goal clearly, and be laser-focused.
- Measurable: How will you know you’ve achieved your goal if it isn’t measurable? For that, you’ll need the right KPIs (which we’ll get into below).
- Achievable: The last thing you want is a goal that looks good on paper but isn’t feasible, right?
- Realistic: Is your goal realistic? No one wants to set themselves up for failure!
- Timely: Establish a sense of urgency by setting a timeline (with a starting date and deadline). So, set your expected KPIs for a specific period.
2. Choose Your KPIs
Now, it’s time to choose the suitable metrics and KPIs to measure your goals. They’ll tell you how successful your campaign is, shed light on any problems, and urge you in the right direction. The goal here is to select KPIs that’ll help collect relevant data, not just any KPIs.
3. Track Your Campaign Progress
With your KPIs in place, you can now monitor your marketing campaign. So, collect the needed data in every stage of the customer lifecycle. That’s how you can identify a strong marketing campaign. Those stages are:
- Awareness: This is the phase of generating brand awareness and introducing your brand to potential customers. You can measure it via impressions, CTR, visits, social media engagement, attention minutes, and more.
- Acquisition: In this phase, you can identify your customers as individuals. Give them some content, and get permission to message them in the future. To measure its success, check out new leads, sales and support chats, email subscribers, and downloads.
- Activation: The activation phase starts when users try out a sample of your service or product, and you can refer to sales, new trial signups, and loss-leader product sales to evaluate its success.
- Revenue: Revenue is when customers invest in your product or service. In this phase, you can track the first purchase, customer acquisition cost, and trial to paid conversion.
- Retention: Retention relates to incremental revenue and how capable you are of keeping customers. Its metrics include expansion revenue, net promoter score (NPS), and customer lifetime value (CLTV).
- Referral: Word of mouth may be the oldest trick in the book, but it’s very effective in generating sales. You can measure the success of this phase using social shares, net promoter score, and more.
What Are the KPIs Used to Measure Success?
Now, let’s go over the different KPIs to help you decide on the best ones for your upcoming campaign.
Return on Investment (ROI)
ROI is the amount of revenue your marketing campaign brings in compared to the money you spend, and the higher it is, the more effective your campaign is. To measure it, you can add up the cost per conversion, click, and acquisition. For instance, if you make $3,000 in sales after spending $1,000, that’d make the ROI $2,000 or 200%.
Overall, ROI is arguably the best KPI to assess your marketing campaign’s effectiveness. After all, it gives you insights into the quality of its generated leads.
Conversion Rate
Also known as the goal completion rate, the conversion rate tracks how many visitors to your website turn into leads or sales during the campaign. To illustrate, your website might get 1,000 visitors during the first week of your marketing campaign. If they generate 100 leads, that translates to a 10% conversion rate.
Along with bounce rates and other metrics, conversion rates tell you what you need to know about the traffic quality. We’re talking downloading white papers, making sales, and clicking on email links.
Click Through Rate (CTR)
Do you think tracking the number of total clicks or unique clicks by different subscribers will help you evaluate your marketing campaign? If so, CTR is the KPI you’re after, helping you understand how engaging your content is and how relevant your ads are. Simply, it’s the percentage of subscribers who click on your email’s links.
Cost Per Win
The cost per win or cost per sale is the cost of each sale against the total marketing costs. So, if your marketing campaign costs $2,000, and you make 5 sales, that’s $400 per sale. A good idea is to compare costs per win for different campaigns to determine which is best.
Cost Per Lead
You can evaluate how financially successful a marketing campaign is by tracking the cost per lead, which is the number of leads (not sales). Accordingly, the cost per lead doesn’t reflect the quality of those leads.
To illustrate, a marketing campaign with a $1,000 budget may generate five sales. But what we care about is that these five sales are the result of 10 leads, making the cost $100 per lead.
Cost Per Conversion
Does your company deal in online sales directly? If so, you need to measure the cost per conversion or cost per acquisition, which is the price of turning a visitor to your website into a buyer via marketing and advertising.
This metric goes hand in hand with the customer lifetime value, enabling you to decide if the profit is worth the investment.
Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)
To estimate the predicted revenues a customer will bring in, you should calculate the customer lifetime value. Multiply the customer’s average sale amount by the number of times they buy your products a year by the average number of years you retain them.
With the customer lifetime value in mind, you can decide on a budget for your new marketing campaign.
Website Traffic
How many people visit your website, you may wonder. If your marketing campaign uses the company website for advertising, website traffic can help you understand if and when your marketing campaigns are working. For instance, a drop in website traffic can alert you to a technical issue (like broken links).
To illustrate, you can track the website traffic by individual users and the total traffic figure. Then, you can compare that number in certain sessions to other numbers collected outside of the marketing campaign.
To collect valuable insights about the success of your marketing strategies, combine website traffic numbers with traffic source data and pageviews per session. We just love how quickly and accurately you can measure website traffic!
Traffic by Source
You may want to learn about the source of your website’s traffic. Are you dealing with direct visitors, organic visitors, referral links, or social media links?
This is where traffic by source comes in. If your website is getting tons of new visitors, congratulations! Your marketing campaign is a raging success. Otherwise, returning visitors tell you that your website content’s quality is up to par. Also, this metric will help you notice the drops in any source and overcome them with suitable strategies.
Email Open Rate
We can’t talk about KPIs without mentioning email open rates. So, how many people open your emails compared to those who receive them? Almost all email management tools will provide you with this data.
Page Views
The number of page views shows you just how your website traffic is distributed. Is it evenly distributed across most pages, or are some pages performing better than others? Identify the better-performing pages, and place ads on them.
This metric also relates to the exit rate – the point where visitors leave your website. Knowing the exit rate can help you understand their experiences and needs. We also can’t forget the bounce rate, the percentage of people who leave your website after viewing only one page.
Social Media Engagement
Social media is one of the most accessible tools. Social media platforms will tell you just how many likes, comments, clicks, and shares your content has received. This way, you can learn how many people your marketing campaign has reached and assess your brand awareness.
Final Thoughts
Ultimately, you can estimate the success of your marketing campaign by setting SMART goals, choosing the right KPIs, and collecting data regularly.
When it comes to the helpful KPIs for your campaign, you need to consider your marketing campaign goals and which KPIs better reflect them. But you don’t have to do it alone because we at Shiftweb can help you. Just schedule a consultation by filling out our online form, and let us do the rest!