How to Measure the Success of Your Digital Marketing Campaign?

A positive ROI is the goal of every digital marketing campaign. However, calculating your ROI is not always easy. It depends on your specific marketing objectives and the tactics you use. For example, while some campaigns aim to boost your sales, others will raise brand awareness, retain customers, drive more traffic to your blog, or encourage brand advocacy. 

Here we will review several tactics and metrics that are critical for measuring the success of your campaigns.

Doing the Prep Work

Before you choose your metrics, you first need to set clear objectives, set a time frame, and choose the right tools for measuring the success of your marketing campaigns.

Set Realistic Goals

To build a successful digital marketing strategy and measure its performance, you should first set specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely goals. By setting clear goals, you will be able to understand whether your campaign is making progress. 

Commit to a Clear Time Frame

Setting a clear time frame will help you create a sense of urgency and accomplishment. That way, you will be able to see whether your digital marketing campaign is performing as expected. 

Automate you Reporting Efforts

There is an analytics tool for almost any aspect of your digital marketing campaign. However, using multiple platforms to track your metrics would consume a lot of your time, effort, and money. You would need to measure your performance via multiple dashboards, extract data to Google Sheets, and then merge it into a comprehensive client report.

Fortunately, you can automate your reporting efforts by investing in a digital marketing reporting tool. Those tools integrate with many data sources, letting you observe your vital SEO, PPC, and social media metrics from a single digital marketing dashboard.

Set the Right Metrics to Track

Now that you have set clear campaign goals, specified your reporting time frame, and chosen the right analytics and reporting tools, it is time to choose the right metrics for your digital marketing campaign. When selecting digital marketing metrics, do not let them overwhelm you. Focus on those that will reflect the performance of your campaigns and help you make informed decisions in the future. We have cherry-picked a few essential metrics any digital marketer should track.

1. The overall website traffic

Most of your digital marketing channels have a simple goal – to drive traffic to your website. However, remember that increased traffic does not necessarily mean more leads. To audit the performance of your site, you should also know whether your traffic converts into leads and, ultimately, sales. 

1. Traffic by source

This metric tells you where your website visitors come from. That way, you can understand which digital channels work for you and which ones need a little more tweaking. 

On Google Analytics, you can track the four key traffic sources – organic search, direct visitors, referrals, and social traffic.

1. New visitors vs. returning visitors

This metric compares new website visitors and returning ones. That way, it helps you determine how relevant and engaging your content is over time. Namely, apart from driving new visits, your goal is to build relationships with your target audience and retain them in the long-run. 

You can track this metric directly from Google Analytics. However, it is often inaccurate. For example, if a user clears cookies and visits your site again, GA will see those two visits as separate ones and mark them as “New.” 

1. The average session duration

A website session starts when a user lands on your page and ends after 30 minutes of inactivity. Any activity performed by a user, from clicks to purchases, is counted as a single session. 

The average session duration is the total duration of all website sessions, divided by the number of sessions. Its goal is to tell you how much time users stay on your site on average. 

This metric depends on your industry. According to Brafton, hospital and healthcare sites have the highest session duration, averaging 3 minutes and 38 seconds. The majority of industries surveyed have the average session duration under 2 minutes.

The conversion rate

The conversion rate tells you how many leads have converted (downloaded a PDF file, made a purchase, etc.). You can calculate it by dividing the number of the leads generated by the number of customers you have obtained and then multiplying this number by 100. For example, if 100 people saw your ad but only four signed up, your conversion rate is 4%. 

You should also measure:

Over to You

Digital marketers often believe that, once the campaign is live, they can finally kick back and relax. Unfortunately, that is not true. Once you set up your campaign, you need to measure its performance. Set realistic goals, determine your time frame, and choose automated reporting tools to measure your results from a single dashboard. 

When choosing metrics, focus on those that are in line with your campaign goals. Avoid vanity metrics, such as your social media likes, which will boost your ego, and yet, tell you nothing about the actual performance of your campaigns.