Top metrics to assess the effectiveness of a marketing campaign
The appearance of social media platforms has facilitated the task of launching highly-segmented marketing campaigns via Google AdWords, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or even LinkedIn while allowing marketers to analyze in real-time the performance of such campaigns through a series of metrics.
These metrics, also known as key performance indicators (KPI), attempt to evaluate the campaigns from different angles, such as how engaged users are with the content, how many of them have clicked through the ad, and the percentage of the audience that ends up buying a product or service from the company as a result of being exposed to the ads.
However, with so much data now being available for marketers to analyze the performance of their campaigns, which ones should a small business owner prioritize and why?
The following article aims to provide a list of the top metrics you should keep an eye on to assess the effectiveness of your digital marketing campaign.
Understanding the multiple types of metrics
Digital marketing is a relatively young branch of the marketing discipline, which means that its foundations and best practices are still being modeled by those who have become successful at cracking digital ads.
Over the years, experts have classified KPIs applied to digital marketing campaigns as follows:
· Traffic: measurement of the volume of the audience that is exposed to the ad along with their interactions, such as how many clicked through or interacted with the content
· Brand awareness: these metrics aim to illustrate the campaign’s overall and target-specific reach
· Conversion: typically define the absolute or relative performance of the campaign in terms of how many people completed the entire sales funnel
· Profitability: they portrait how much money the company is making based on the sales produced by the campaign and the total amount spent on the ads (may also be referred to as Marketing Margin)
· Sentiment: these metrics illustrate the reaction that users are having to the content portrayed on the campaign (likes, shares, etc.).
· Cost: the amount spent on each campaign, segment, and ad while also communicating how much it costs to convert people or to get them to release their contact info (leads)
· Engagement: these metrics show the degree to which users have been interacting with the publications such as how many comments have been generated, etc.
Now that we have classified these metrics, the following is a selection of the most popular ones used to assess the effectiveness of a digital marketing campaign:
· Unique reach: shows you how many individuals have been exposed to your ads
· Return on Ad Spend (ROAS): tracks how many dollars in sales you have been making per every dollar you have spent on ads
· Click-through rate (CTR): this metric shows you how many people have clicked on the different clickable elements of the campaign (call to action, picture, links, etc.)
· Cost per 1,000 impressions: commonly used to analyze the cost of reaching a certain audience as platforms often follow a bidding process in which the highest bidders get the most attractive spots within the platform. A high cost per 1,000 impressions indicates that there are many bidders seeking to place their ads in front of the same audience, which means that you will have to outbid them to win your spot
· Cost per unique clicks (CPC): it reflects how much you are paying for every person who clicks on your ads
· Conversion rate: this KPI shows you the percentage of people that have gone through your entire sales funnel to complete a purchase, download, or submission
· Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): the customer acquisition cost is the overall cost incurred to get a person to become a user through your ads
· Cost per lead (CPL): this KPI reflects the cost of getting a person’s contact information through your ad
Bottom line
These popular metrics are not the only ones, nor they are the ones that are necessarily the most effective to evaluate all marketing campaigns. However, they do provide a good picture of how most campaigns are doing by tracking their performance from different perspectives.
Now that you know them, are you ready to start rolling out your first campaigns? How can this information help you in improving your business’ current digital marketing efforts?
Feel free to comment or share your thoughts!
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marketing by Eucalyp from the Noun Project
marketing by Turkkub from the Noun Project