How to Measure the Success of Your Digital Marketing Campaign

You have chosen a digital agency and agreed the size and scope of your digital marketing campaign, now you can sit back, relax and wait for the sales to roll in. Correct? Well, not necessarily. Agreeing the campaign is only the start of the process. If you want to get the best return for your investment, your commitment to making it work is still a key part of the process. It is correct that the agency should have the guile and expertise to run your campaign successfully. It’s also right for a client to expect results and a measured ROI. Before the campaign commences, your digital agency should have put in the proper research time, carried out the campaign set up diligently, and set a realistic forecast for success with you. Now it’s time to execute the plan, and throughout the process, they should be maintaining a dialogue with you to make sure everything is working for you along the way. As the client, for your part, here’s what to keep any eye on along the way:

Look for incremental improvement

Of course, it’s always nice to get things off to a flying start, but try to keep your expectations on a realistic level. Sustained success takes time. Planning and research are key to the initial successful launch of any marketing campaign, however, there will always be an element of trial and error involved in services such as PPC or Social Media advertising as data is gathered and analysed. On-site SEO and content marketing combined, provide slow and steady progress by design as relevant content and rankings build organically. Executed well, these services can also deliver prolonged success. Qualified Google Ad Managers know that following the initial set up and launch, campaigns need to be closely monitored, updated and maintained - often on a daily basis. 

This can mean making tiny tweaks to keyword lists, adding negative search terms (keywords you don’t want your ads to show for) or changing ad copy on a daily basis. In more extreme cases, when data dictates, a complete change of campaign focus may be required before sales or enquiries begin to roll in. I always maintain that digital marketing is all about finding out what works for you, and then doing more of it. That said, after 2 or 3 months into a campaign, you should expect to see some real progress. You should also be able to see incremental improvements in the reports that your agency provide. Take the time to analyse what they are telling you, and if you have any issues understanding what they provide, then I’m sure they’d be grateful for your feedback. We have found that in running our reports, some clients are entirely analytical and relish seeing as much detail and data as possible, whereas others find too much data daunting and would rather be given specific markers, followed by a quick phone call, to go over progress. At Big Red, we talk to our clients and tailor our reporting so that it makes things clear to them.

Assess the quality of response

Imagine that the main aim of your campaign is to drive enquiries/leads through to your business. This may manifest itself as emails coming through to you once someone has filled in an enquiry form on your site. The ultimate aim of the campaign should be to provide you with regular, high quality sales leads. It’s not all about volume either; quality is just as important as quantity here. As enquiries begin to flow, ask your team to provide you with measured feedback on things like:

1. Is the right information coming through to facilitate a quote or sale? If not, some updates to the enquiry form may be required.

2. Are you getting the right kind of leads? E.g. Perhaps you’re getting loads of requests for information or advice, but no concrete orders as a result. A change to what you offer on your web pages could help here.

3. Are they relevant to specific products or services? If enquiries come in with often ambiguous requests, consider what can be done to rectify this.

4. Is the process working for your customers? Gather customer feedback on the enquiry process and make improvements where relevant.

All of the above will take time and as the campaign progresses, and things are updated, everything should begin to run more smoothly.

Analyse ROI

The most important thing is to regularly keep track of what kind of return you are getting for your investment. This should also improve incrementally as momentum gathers. Track the outgoing cost of your campaign versus the revenue and profit you are receiving. Work out what you are paying ‘per lead’ and weigh that up as a value proposition against your cost of sales, and of what it would cost you to generate that volume of sales leads by traditional methods such as cold calling. To get a fuller picture of the impact your campaign is having, it may transpire that you need to introduce some internal processes to help confirm the source of an enquiry. For example, someone may make a call to you having seen what they want on your website and if this isn’t being tracked via analytics, you may want to attribute it accordingly. You could have your staff ask how the customer came to know about you or a specific product they’re asking about. If they say they found you or the item online, then this means the website and the marketing campaign is doing its job.

Adjust investment to suit

Your initial agreement may be for an initial 6 or 12 month campaign and by then end of it you should know what impact it has had on your business. At this stage, you will be able to sit down with your digital agency and work out a strategy to either continue, cut or increase your marketing budget in year 2. For example, once best practice has been established and your website is highly optimised and ranking well, your agency could potentially do less on that element for you each month. Therefore, some of the budget previously spent on SEO could be freed up to help make more of an impact elsewhere online e.g. Social Media or PPC. 

Keep talking

By doing the above, you can regularly provide feedback to your digital agency on what is working for you and what needs to be improved. We love it when clients do this because it helps us do a better job on their behalf. Teamwork makes the dream work!

Ready for success?

The success of every marketing campaign we run is measured solely by the return that we get for our clients. Contact our Sales Manager, Roisin McNeill now on 0141 771 7242, or drop us a line here and we'll contact you to discuss the possibilities for your business. We’ll be tracking performance with you all the way.

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