Updated 16.03.2023
If you don’t measure, you won’t know what to optimize. In other words, the success of an online marketing campaign consists of measuring the results and testing different ways of promotion, until you reach the one that brings you the best results.
The digital environment offers us a series of tools through which we can monitor the performance of a campaign, but we need to know how to use them to get the results we want. For this, here are some tips to consider when you want to measure the effectiveness of a campaign.
Set your SMART goals
Measuring a campaign starts with setting goals. Determine from the beginning what results you want to achieve and, based on these, start creating the campaign and implementing the measurement methods. Depending on the specifics of your business, the objectives can be: increasing sales (products or services), increasing the number of newsletter subscriptions, website traffic, downloading a brochure or eBook, viewing a video and much more. Remember, whatever your goal, it’s important to set a time limit and present at least one progress indicator.
To clarify this point, we can consider the following example. Let’s say we have an online store and sell homemade pasta. A SMART goal would be: to increase the number of sales from 40 in the current month to 60 in the next 2 months. Thus, our goal is Specific, Measurable, Accessible, Relevant and Time-bound.
Establish your target audience
The target audience is not all people between the ages of 18 and 65. Take into account what you offer and target only the segment(s) interested in the product or service you offer. This will help you measure the results obtained much more easily and make your promotion campaign an investment, not an expense.
If we refer to our online pasta store, we will be able to set as a target audience: people who love pasta dishes, those who are passionate about cooking (because they also need to be prepared), those who watch food shows. In terms of age, we can start from 18 years old, since they are easy to prepare and we can even reach up to 65 years old. Thus, we will have to have several target audiences (main and secondary), because each one will have a different need, and communication will be achieved through different messages.
When to start measuring a campaign?
Once you’ve set your goals and determined who your target audience is, the next step is to implement your campaign. One of the benefits of an online campaign is that the results are seen shortly after the campaign has been activated, but to determine exactly what works and what doesn’t, a longer period of monitoring and testing is needed. Test several landing pages, messages or images from the beginning and see which ones perform best.
Tools to measure the results of a campaign
Regardless of the promotion platform you choose (Facebook, Google, LinkedIn), they provide you with valuable data on the performance of your campaigns, such as number of clicks, impressions, click-through rate, cost per click, number of conversions, conversion rate and much more. If you have an online store or any other type of business that involves a user’s action on the site (signing up for a newsletter, adding data for downloading an eBook), don’t forget to implement the conversion code (for Google Ads campaigns) or Facebook Pixel (for Facebook campaigns).
This will give you an overview of how your campaign(s), ad groups, or keywords are performing. With this data, you will know which are the most searched products or services, for which of them it is advisable to increase or decrease your budget, what are the areas you need to insist on, the time slots between which users convert and much more. Next, based on this data, you will know what works and needs to be optimized.
One of the most important tools in a marketer’s arsenal remains Google Analytics. It helps you monitor the performance of an online campaign (Facebook, Google Ads) in correlation with other traffic sources (organic, direct, email, referral), to see what is the behavior of users on the site or how they interact with the site.
If you have an online store and you have the eCommerce Tracking function activated, you can track the evolution of the sales generated, the most frequently added products to the cart, the cart abandonment rate, the channels that generate the most sales and other relevant indicators.
These are just a few ways you can measure the impact of an online campaign. However, in order to achieve the best results for your campaign, you need to know exactly your objectives, your target audience and your competitive advantages, developing your messages based on them and implementing the most effective ways to measure.
