5 Ways To Track The Success of Your Marketing Campaign

5 Ways To Track The Success
of Your Marketing Campaign

There’s no denying that it’s tough to build a 100-percent effective marketing campaign. There are so many variables at play and so many options on the table that it’s impossible to get it perfect. But ask yourself this… would you even know if you did get it perfect? Sure, you can slog away, toiling for hours and hours on that marketing campaign but if you don’t track it, what’s the point?

metrics

Measuring the success of your marketing is just as important a factor as the marketing itself. It allows you to see what’s working and what’s not, axing the bad stuff and buffing the good stuff. Without a defined tracking method, you’ll be lost in the dark. But something that’s even better than a defined tracking method is multiple defined tracking methods. So, with this in mind, let’s explore five different ways for you to track the success of your advertising campaign:

1. Link Tracking

Hyperlinks, bit-links, URLs, whatever you want to call them, they’ll be at the forefront of your online marketing. Because links get the most exposure, they’re the metric that’s the most important to track.

You’ll have links dotted all over your online presence, including:

  • In your social media descriptions
  • In your social media posts
  • On your website
  • In your emails/email marketing campaigns
  • On any business listings you have
  • On SERPs relating to your business

And by tracking the number of clicks each of these links receive, you can glean some valuable information. You can tell which links are most appealing to users, which are easiest to see, and whether text anchor links or plain URLs are more effective. The best way to track links is to use an online click tracking tool. You can gain some valuable insights, including times clicked, views and even conversions.

2. Software Tools

Advertising campaigns are layered beasts that can become very difficult to measure. As we mentioned at the start, there are so many different variables at play that it’s hard to know where to begin. It’s even harder to gain campaign reporting, trending information and future forecasts in one place. You have to know which ads are working and which aren’t, to prevent you from wasting your time and budget. Plentiful options include professional ad management software, and even Google AdWords.

3. Page Views

Even a metric as basic as page views can tell you quite a lot. And, as an added bonus, it’s ridiculously easy to track, with pretty much every CMS on the planet offering it as standard. Rather than just looking at page views though, you should try and get clever with them. Try creating a page that’s only accessible through clicking a series of links. This way, you can see how many people actually go out of their way to click through these links and get to the page.

It’s no good just tracking home page views, or popular article views. Any random web user could inadvertently end up there. You need to track the views of pages that are difficult to locate by accident. Using heat maps and tracking time spent on each page can’t hurt either.

Heat maps can provide you’re a number of data points:

  • Where the most popular areas of your page are
  • What links on your page get clicked the most
  • Which areas of your page are utterly bland
  • Which ads are receiving the most attention

Using this data, you can restructure your page, and place the most important content in the ‘hot’ areas. Time spent allows you to measure the effectiveness of your content, which articles people like, and which hold the attention the longest. This allows you to understand what people want to read from, and can help determine the true quality of your copy.

4. Social Media

Social media presents numerous metrics to you right from the beginning. The most prominent of these are followers, page likes and retweets. And obviously these will be able to tell you what’s working simply. Are lots of people liking that photo? Lost a couple of followers over the weekend? Why? What went wrong? You can attribute lost followers to a number of factors. Perhaps your presence declined over the weekend. Less posts equals less user engagement which equals less followers. Tools like HootSuite can act as your social media bot when you’re not around.

5. Email Openings

Direct email marketing is something we’ve all experienced, even if you’ve never used it as a marketing tool. It’s those emails you receive from companies every week, advertising various products and services. Perhaps you didn’t even sign up for that mailing, but you got it anyway. But don’t worry, that’s normal. Marketers can find your email address using email registers and lists, which are incredibly common. On the marketing side, email presents a great opportunity to target users right in their inbox.

But how can you measure their success beyond that? You can measure how many times that email is opened to see how many people read. This is a valuable metric in many ways, not least because it tells you what people think of your brand. If many never open your email, you’re likely not garnering the right audience. If open rates are high however, you’re definitely on the right track.

In Conclusion

It’s glaringly obvious that analytics are important in many areas of business. From sales to customer data, all the way through to your ad campaigns, tracking data is a must. It allows you to see what’s working and what’s not, so you can adjust accordingly. And that is the key to a successful campaign. It’s not just tracking data and resting on your laurels. It’s about taking that data and using it to improve.