Your Guide to Measuring Marketing ROI
The days of marketing in the dark are over. In digital, print and mass media advertising, the ability to track results and measure your marketing ROI is at an all-time high.
There are three main steps that should be followed when trying to calculate your marketing ROI: Data Collection, Analysis and Conclusions. Each step is equally important and dependent on the others to be successful, but they have to be completed in that order. With that in mind, we will use three different blog posts to outline the entire process, starting today with data collection.
This step will shape the entire process of evaluating your marketing, so your focus should be on collecting accurate, relevant data to your specific campaign.
There are different ways to track and gather this information, and they vary quite a bit based on the media used for your efforts. For that reason, it’s easiest to separate and address each style individually.
Digital
This is our bread and butter. While there are emerging ways to track the other forms of marketing, digital offers the most in-depth information into who your efforts are reaching, how they’re receiving it and what it’s generating. This is especially true when seeking lead generation and conversions – digital is the easiest way to guarantee results.
To collect data from your digital marketing, most platforms you use will have an analytics function built into them. We don’t recommend using these as the place to house all of your analytics, but they can be useful as a reference to ensure accuracy.
For tracking all traffic to your site, how it arrived there, the quality of the average visit and much more, we recommend a web analytics tool.
The most common tool is Google Analytics, and for good reason. It has a very easy-to-use interface and provides all the basic information necessary to evaluate your programs. On top of all that, it’s a free service.
For bigger or ecommerce brands, paid services such as Clicky, Mint or KISSmetrics are definitely worth it to collect and present your data in a more personalized format. If your activity is very time-sensitive, Clicky can be especially worth it because it is the only one of the listed services that offer real-time results. The other platforms only provide reports up to the day before you are using them.
All of these platforms are proven to work and will track all necessary metrics such as new users, time on site, bounce rate, pages per session and many more. These are some of the most helpful metrics for measuring Marketing ROI.
While you won’t be able to collect the same amount of data through print as you would in digital, it does offer other benefits and is easily trackable.
The predominant way to track your print ads is through unique URLs or unique phone numbers with services like ResponseTap and DialogTech. Both of these solutions will allow you to track the traffic from an independent campaign or ad, but they address different demographics and allow for some A/B testing.
Unique URLs will allow you to track a portion of your ads’ reach and will allow for more comparison with your other online data. You can compare the quality of traffic from print to digital ads and make adjustments to your budget accordingly.
Call tracking and unique phone numbers allow for direct lead tracking and can even offer recorded calls which can assist in the evaluation of any over-the-phone customer service.
Radio/TV
For the results of your mass media advertising, you’ll need to rely on the broadcaster for some of your data. They should be able to provide data on the reach and Gross Rating Point (GRP) of your ads.
GRP is a method used to estimate the quality of awareness you receive from your advertising. Similar to print ads, to track any traffic or conversions, you’ll need to incorporate unique URLs or phone numbers.
They should also be able to provide rough estimates of the demographics you’ll be presented to, but most of that should be strategized beforehand based on the network you choose.
The conversion rates and ROI on these style of ads will really depend on the timeline of your strategy. The data available in this style is more directed towards brand awareness, and may require a larger investment and more time to create a foundation of customers that are exposed to the ad more than once.
Knowing your marketing goals is essential to understanding the metrics you want to evaluate, which should also affect how you allocate your budget. The amount of data available for online marketing is much greater than the other forms, but many studies show that campaigns synced on multiple media are more effective.
However you allocate your budget, it’s important to ensure that you are gathering the necessary data to evaluate the performance of your strategy and execution. Without it, measure your marketing ROI becomes challenging.
Next week, we will write about analyzing the data you collect and what metrics are important based on your goals.
