Marketers: How to Measure Campaign Effectiveness

Historically, marketers and advertisers would have to rely on word of mouth to measure campaign effectiveness, but now? The creation of intelligent software means marketers can easily track key metrics for optimum performance.

Yet some brands are still choosing not to.

Without measuring advertising campaign effectiveness, you run the risk of wasting a lot of time and money on a campaign that will never deliver the umph you want it to. You can’t just press ‘play’ on an ad campaign, cross your fingers, and hope for the best, and then be disappointed when it doesn’t deliver new leads in their droves, can you?

However, when you measure the effectiveness of an ad campaign, it results in data-driven decisions. You know exactly how your target audience is reacting to your campaigns, which means, hey presto, you can save money by spending budget on what works best for your brand every time.

If you would like to change your ways and begin measuring campaign effectiveness, stay tuned. This article outlines exactly how you can accurately measure success whether it be clicks and reach or overall brand performance.

How to Measure Advertising Campaign Effectiveness

How to Measure Results

The marketplace is filled with intelligent tools to help marketers measure campaign results cross-channel, so sometimes, finding the best tool for the job can be tricky. We’re sharing some of our favorite tools to help you measure results across multiple elements of your marketing campaign.

Bin the vanity metrics and dive deeper into social

A lot of brands focus on vanity metrics, including how many likes a post receives. When really, you should be looking at the bigger picture and asking yourself, are your campaigns meeting or exceeding the KPIs set? Are you making progress? And are you listening and delivering what your audience wants?

Two metrics you should hone in on when measuring social impact are reach and click-through rate.

By measuring the reach of your post, you’re able to see just how well-received your post has been by its intended audience. You can then analyze what made this particular post perform better or worse than others.

Measuring the click-through rate is crucial to determining whether your ad strikes a chord with people enough for them to act and click on the link. To find out the click-through rate of your post, divide the total number of clicks with the total number of impressions, multiply by 100, and you’ll have your click-through rate percentage. This is a metric you can keep track of across campaigns – it’s a really straightforward way to measure social impact.

Dive deep into platform-specific analytics and learn more about how your social content is consumed. For example, Twitter’s built-in analytics dashboard enables marketers to gain a clearer picture of content performance. At a glance, learn which posts resonate with your audience, which content is gaining traction and how your profile is performing on a monthly basis.

Take the time to learn from others around you with social listening tools. Social listening helps you proactively respond to news stories or trends happening in your industry. Let’s take Hootsuite as an example. In Hootsuite, you can set up multiple streams and keep tabs on your brand mentions, or user comments across all social media accounts, you can set up streams to keep track of specific industry-related keywords, so you’re able to respond quickly and deliberately to keep building your brand’s social footprint.

There are many social management and listening tools available today, not just Hootsuite. Other tools out there including Sprout Social and Buffer. You just need to find the best one for your campaign goals.

Track important email marketing metrics

If you’re actively engaging audience members through an email marketing campaign, you should consider investing in an email marketing tool like Campaign Monitor or Mailchimp. Tools like these can help you build a picture of your audience, and automation helps guide them through closing to the end of the funnel.

According to Campaign Monitor, email marketing is the channel with the highest ROI – so measuring it correctly is step one of a superb email strategy.

Setting up automated email journeys sounds like a lot of work, and we’re not going to lie to you; it is. But once your primitive email journey is set up, you can learn more about how audience members interact with your email content, what links they click, and you can start to build a refined customer journey that educates and converts.

You can also utilize email tools to analyze clickthrough rate, conversion rate, cost per lead, list growth, open rate, unsubscribe rate, and more to better inform all your email marketing campaigns going forward.

Knowledge is power, as the saying goes, so why wouldn’t you enrich your email marketing campaigns with a tool like Campaign Monitor or Mailchimp?

Use Google Analytics to measure overall campaign performance

If you run a Google-specific campaign, for example, through Google Ads, you can use the Google Ad dashboard to determine campaign results quickly. But what if you want to see all elements contributing to your campaign results?

Let’s say you’re running a campaign to educate your audience about your latest product. To promote this product, you might create social media posts, Google Ads, publish blogs on third-party websites and send out emails to your subscribers. You can measure each channel separately, but wouldn’t it be great if you could get an overview of all channels and how each has contributed to the success of your campaign?

You can track all campaign elements by using Google’s Campaign URL Builder. This simple and free tool enables you to create unique links for each element of your campaign.

Tracking custom campaigns has never been easier. Take a look at the screenshot below. Paste the URL to the landing page you want customers to land on, tag the campaign source whether it’s ‘newsletter’ or ‘Twitter post’ etc. and tag a ‘campaign name’. It’s crucial you keep the campaign name the same across all links you create, as the URL builder is case-sensitive. If you name your campaign the name of your product, for example, New-Product-One, you need to keep this campaign name uniform for Google to notice it’s part of the same campaign.

Source: Google Analytics Dev Tools

After you’ve created your unique links, locate all campaign results by navigating to Google Analytics, click on ‘acquisition’ on the left-hand menu, ‘campaigns’, ‘all campaigns’ and find the tagged campaign name in the list.

P.S. you can still use a link shortening tool to make your links neater when sharing.

Measuring your custom campaigns by data driven decisions this way can give you a clear overview of how all marketing elements contribute to your overall campaign goals, which is essential to measuring impact over time.

How to measure brand performance

Measuring brand performance is just as important as measuring downloads or conversions. You need measurable evidence that your brand is well-received amongst its target demographic.

You need to confidently measure your advertising campaigns’ overall impact – how does your organization measure up to competitors in your field? Without this knowledge, you’re not able to build brand longevity and direction.

Your campaigns serve an immediate purpose – to increase conversions, to grow your following, to increase guide downloads, whatever your end goal is. But they should always reflect your overall brand objectives.

You need to build a recognizable brand loved by a loyal audience, and you can’t do that without measuring its impact.

A brand tracking tool like Latana can help you measure brand performance by helping you:

• visualize the impact campaigns have on your core audience in terms of KPIs
• go more granular with audience segmentation to tracking campaigns targeted to specific audiences, with the ability to track audience members living in the city where your localized marketing campaign is launched
• add custom questions to track KPIs specific to brand examples with Ad Awareness KPI
• pinpoint the source of awareness or ad channels and paint a clear picture of where your audience heard about you

4 key metrics to track brand performance

As you start to measure brand performance, you don’t want to overwhelm yourself by tracking too many metrics. Track these four key metrics to help you find your feet.

1. Target audience brand perception

Without measuring brand perception, you’re unaware of how your target audience views your brand, and customer perception can directly affect purchasing behavior. Even the briefest of interactions can cause customers to do a 180 on your brand.

Consistently measuring brand perception, means, over time, your company can get a clearer understanding of what factors are driving customer loyalty and which are slowly killing your brand. To measure brand perception you can send out brand perception surveys and actively engage in outside market research to determine brand sentiment.

2. Pageviews

This metric is self-explanatory, but measuring pageviews is a great way to gauge interest. Are there more returning users? Where are they coming from? i.e. social media, Google Ads. Although considered a vanity metric, pageviews are a great indicator of campaign direction, so don’t discount them from your brand performance report.

3. Inbound links

Measuring not just the volume of inbound links but also the source of those inbound links will help you determine how your brand performs. Discount the spammy or low-quality links, and then focus on who is linking directly to you. Are they credible third-party sites? Are they sites where your target audience hangs out? If so, you’re doing a great job of generating more brand awareness in your marketplace.

4. Clicks

Measuring clicks is a given; the more clicks, the more intriguing your ad copy was. More clicks mean the user resonates with the copy you’ve written. But you need to measure beyond clicks. Once clicked through, where did they go? Did they bounce straight off your website? If they did, maybe your ad copy isn’t aligning with the associated landing page. You need to create a user journey from ad to landing page and beyond that is cohesive and delivers on your ad copy’s promise.

To sum up

It’s crucial you have a measurement strategy in place for each campaign element, but don’t forget to reflect on the campaign as a whole to measure brand performance.

Brand performance is something that directly impacts how your audience receives your campaigns – the two go together.

So, when measuring campaign effectiveness, don’t forget to:

• Consistently seek feedback from your target audience through brand perception surveys
• Don’t get too caught up in vanity metrics; they serve as loose directional indicators only
• Track all campaign elements both separately and together
• Consider Latana’s intelligent brand tracking software to make better, more informed marketing decisions

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