How do you know if your digital marketing campaign is working? As a Diamond Marketing Agency we work with a lot of clients and demonstrating success is always a focal point for our client communication. We work hard to drive results and when a client doesn't realize how good their numbers are we have no one to blame but ourselves. Whether you're a marketing executive trying to develop a system for monitoring campaign success or a business owner just trying to keep a grip on what your marketing agency is producing, the challenge is legitimate.
I recently wrote an article detailing 8 steps to managing the chaos of a digital world focused on instant gratification. The article set the stage for building your digital marketing services and strategy to combat the reality we face as marketers and I've subsequently written 5 more articles to expand on each step. If you're interested in getting the entire story here's the entire list.
- An Inbound Marketer's Guide for Navigating the Need for Instant Gratification
- 5 Strategies for a Digital Marketing Foundation
- Why Your Website is Critical to Digital Marketing Success
- How Keyword Research Drives Search Engine Success
- Amazing Digital Marketing Results by Blogging Aggressively
- Increase Conversions by Serving all Points of the Buyer's Journey
Which Campaign Metrics Should You Be Monitoring?
Measuring results throughout your inbound marketing campaign is a critical step that’s often overlooked. By tracking and analyzing the results your marketing actions produce you’ll be able to constantly improve. If you analyze the data and find things that are working and others that aren’t, make changes. Adjust the elements that are failing and capitalize on the successes by modeling future efforts after those which produce the greatest results.
1. Understand where your traffic is coming from
While overall traffic growth is great, it’s important to keep a close eye on each traffic source. All traffic is not equal and it’s important to understand where your traffic is originating. Make sure your reporting details the source and conversion rates of all your traffic. This way you analyze your strongest and weakest sources and strategize accordingly. You should also look back for comparative purposes, identifying the sources that are growing due to marketing actions. Also note you can review total traffic history, but everyone knows how to do that.
2. Understand how visitors are interacting with your website
If you don't know what they're doing when they get there, you should. Google Analytics provides some nice at-a-glance insights into what's actually happening once a 'session' begins. Understanding the number of page views versus visits, the amount of time visitors spend, and the rate at which they're bouncing can be revealing. In the case of the example below, things look troubling. The bounce rate indicates that nearly 2/3rds of the visits are leaving upon arrival, putting the average pages visited at only 1.58. That just isn't a lot of page views or time on the site which might make a marketer consider how they're positioning themselves online.
3. Understand where your leads are converting
You should put yourself into a continual cycle of page performance review. While you can pull Google Analytics reporting like the graphic above for any individual page you can also look directly at the conversion statistics on HubSpot's Marketing Dashboard, Page Performance Report, and the Landing Page Dashboard. This gives you a lot of options for displaying the data you personally find the most impactful. From my perspective it's important to monitor both totals (compared period over period) as well as conversion percentages for individual pages. The combination let's you know if you're driving enough numbers both to and through your most important conversion paths.
What you can do with your data?
When you understand where your traffic is coming from and what it's doing after it gets there you can revise your strategy effectively. You can also identify your shortcomings, missed opportunities, and under performing channels. Through analysis you’ll be able to identify opportunities for digital marketing improvement and that’s what it’s all about! If you think this is the kind of stuff you need help with, we're here to help. Just click on the image below, give us your contact information, and we'll reach out to schedule a short phone call to discuss.