How should marketers evaluate their campaigns? That’s a question every marketer probably grapples with as they think about how to increase their customer base. Your marketing campaign is the biggest determinant of how easy or difficult it is for your business to gain new customers. Gaining more clients is the key to boosting your sales and revenue, which explains why you should pay attention to how you evaluate your marketing campaign.
After pouring in blood, sweat, and possibly, a little bit of tears into your marketing campaign, that moment of truth finally jets in. Did it really work? But what’s even more important is how you begin to find out if your marketing campaign worked.
How Should Marketers Evaluate Their Campaigns?
You wouldn’t want to be the marketer who throws money around like confetti in a wedding, only to discover that it didn’t work as you imagined. So, how should marketers evaluate their campaigns? How do you set champagne apart from the cheap fizz? Well, it all boils down to getting to know the right metrics and building solid strategies you can rely on every time.
1. Start with the Basics: Define Success Early
Before you kickstart your campaign, you have to know what the definition of success is to your business. And no, success is not just “make more money” or “get more social media likes.” You must be specific. To you, is success a certain percentage increment in web traffic? Or is it increasing your email open rate by 20%? It could also be reducing your cart abandonment rate by, say, 14% because let’s face it, nothing hurts like seeing customers walk out at the last minute of a deal.
Without setting specific goals for your marketing campaign, evaluating its success will be like searching for a needle in a haystack while blindfolded. And possibly tipsy.
2. Traffic, Traffic, Traffic!
Web traffic is the bread and butter of every digital marketing campaign. However, not all web traffic is created in the same way. For instance, gaining so many visitors to your website is certainly great on paper. But if their bouncing rate is higher, it’s high time you investigate and find a solution.
Some key metrics you should pay attention to as far as web traffic is concerned include:
- Total site visits: How many users are visiting your website?
- Unique visitors: Out of all visitors, how many are returning versus new?
- Bounce rate: How fast are these visitors leaving your site? If the bounce rate is quite high, it’s important to rethink how your landing page looks and reconfigure your ad targeting. Sometimes it could be something as simple as the colour of that huge “BUY NOW” button.
Use web tracking tools, like the all-powerful, Google Analytics, to understand the metrics of your site. With Google Analytics, you can:
- Identify issues in your landing pages and quickly resolve them.
- Detect high-traffic resources or peak-traffic times.
- Compare the metrics of your campaign before and after a post.
- Evaluate the year-on-year performance of your campaign.
Web traffic is more like a first date – first impressions matter a lot. So, if visitors aren’t spending enough time on your site, something’s not right.
3. Conversion Rates: The Holy Grail
In answering the big question, “How should marketers evaluate their campaigns,” we must not forget about conversion rates. Let’s be honest—conversions are what make your campaign alive. Whether it’s sales, newsletter signups, or white paper downloads, a conversion is the ultimate indicator that your marketing campaign is bearing fruits.
But here’s one thing you should know: if your conversion rates are plummeting and probably lower than a limbo stick at a Caribbean party, you have some serious work to do.
Here are the key metrics to watch when evaluating your conversion rates in your marketing campaign:
- Overall conversion rates: The percentage of users who complete a desired action.
- Cost per conversion: What does it cost you to actualise each conversion? If the value of a conversion is lower than the cost, well, you’re not exactly winning.
- Click-Through Rate (CTR): How many visitors clicked on a call-to-action button or an ad? If your CTR is low, it simply means your ad is not appealing enough— or you could be targeting the wrong audience altogether.
Here are a few tips on how you can optimize your CTR:
- Monitor user behaviour: You can record user sessions and watch them to understand their interactions with your site. This can also help you spot opportunities for making improvements.
- Request user feedback: Use surveys to request visitors to provide feedback while on your website or engaging with certain features or content.
- Gauge your creative assets: Conduct concept testing or A/B tests to determine which campaign creative asset variations best align with an ideal client profile.
You can never claim your campaign is successful without tasting the sweet satisfaction of a solid conversion. So, in whatever you do, make sure you’re well-informed about your site’s conversions.
4. Engagement: It’s Not Just About Numbers
How should marketers evaluate their campaigns? Assessing user engagement. And don’t get it wrong. It’s not just about how many eyeballs saw your content, but what percentage actually interacted with it.
The key metrics you should watch out for to evaluate your website’s engagement include:
- Social media shares: How many people found your content interesting enough to share it with others?
- Comments and replies: Your audience talks to you through comments and replies.
- Time spent on page: Are users hanging around long enough to consume your content? Or do they leave after reading the first few sentences?
Engagement is more like the conversations after a successful first date. If your audience doesn’t engage with your content, it simply means something’s amiss and needs fixing.
5. ROI: The Bottom Line
In the long run, all the clicks, shares, and engagement in the world don’t mean a bunch if your marketing campaign isn’t giving you a positive return on investment (ROI). ROI is the ultimate measure of how successful your campaign is, and if your expenditure is higher than what’s coming in, you should rethink your strategy. Here are the important metrics you should pay attention to:
- Return on Ad Spend (ROAS): how much revenue are you gaining from every dime you spend on advertising?
- Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV): Are the majority of your customers sticking around longer and spending more?
- Cost Per Acquisition (CPA): How much does it cost you to bring on board a new client? If you have a higher CPA than CLTV, you’ve got more work to do.
The focus here is to answer the question, “How should marketers evaluate their campaigns?” but it won’t hurt to point out a few tips on how you can maximise your ROI:
- Focus your campaign on high-value customers: Determine which user segments are the most profitable and tailor your campaign further to meet their preferences and needs.
- Perform quantitative data evaluation: Use a tool such as Google Analytics to track user behaviour over time. You can identify high-performing campaigns for specific landing page URLs.
ROI is more like the bill after a meal at a restaurant. If the value received doesn’t match what you’re paying for, it means you need to rethink your order.
6. A/B Testing: The Secret Weapon
Every successful marketing campaign runs an A/B test. If you’re not A/B testing, you could be losing money without knowing. Testing different versions of an ad, landing page, and email can help you figure out what’s working and what isn’t. After this, you can optimise your marketing campaigns to achieve maximum effectiveness.
The key metrics to keep an eye on when A/B testing include:
- Conversion rates: Which content version is driving the highest conversion?
- Engagement rates: Are the audience engaging more with version A or B of your content?
- Revenue per visitor: Which version of your content is generating the highest revenue per visitor?
A/B testing lets you test the different versions of your content before settling for one. It’s a surefire way of ensuring the results of your campaign are the best possible.
7. Customer Retention
Another important metric on how should marketers evaluate their campaigns is customer retention. This is your business’s ability to retain its existing customers over time and is important in helping you understand client needs, preferences, and behaviours. It eventually helps you make the necessary changes to promote product-led marketing.
With high customer retention, your acquisition costs become lower, which allows you to experiment with new strategies and channels. However, low customer retention will lead to loss of revenue and potential damage to your brand as you battle with replacing the lost clients.
Here are a few strategies to help you improve customer retention:
- Employ remarketing tactics: Target those clients who are already aware of your brand and try to push them further into your marketing funnel. You can achieve this through customer retention emails and social media retargeting ads.
- Test incentives: Find out the types of rewards customers would appreciate more by using feedback widgets or surveys. Then offer these rewards as incentives for continuing to entrust you with their needs.
If you can’t clearly determine why you have low customer retention, perhaps it would be best to directly reach out to your customers and interview them. Better yet, Eaglytics Co can help you run comprehensive analytics to find out why your retention is lower without bothering your customers.
8. Continuous Improvement: The Never-Ending Story
Astute marketers understand that evaluating a campaign isn’t a one-time thing. It’s an ongoing process that involves learning, adapting to changes, and improving. Whatever bore results last year and today might be obsolete in the future. So, how should marketers evaluate their campaigns for continued success?
- Regular reporting: Continue monitoring the key metrics regularly. Generate monthly or quarterly reports to help you identify trends and adjust accordingly.
- Learn from past mistakes: Not every marketing campaign will be a home run, and that’s totally fine. The crucial thing is to learn from your past mistakes and apply the lessons learnt in your next campaign.
Continuous improvement is the same as fine-tuning a recipe. Each iteration gets you closer to perfection.
Wrapping Up
How should marketers evaluate their campaigns? Well, there’s no single perfect strategy. But whatever you do, make sure it revolves around specificities of traffic, conversions, ROI, engagement, A/B testing, and customer retention. With the right metrics, strategies, and a little bit of patience, it’s possible to identify what’s working, what’s not, and how to improve your next campaign. Most importantly, don’t hesitate to use expert advice that bases all decisions on analytics. Eaglytics Co offers a wide array of business analytics services to help you discover key insights in your campaign. So, the next time you’re staring down a heap of data, no need to panic. Get in touch with Eaglytics to discover the important metrics that can help you shape your marketing campaign success.
