Although it may seem obvious, it’s important to understand that the analysis stage is absolutely crucial in measuring your marketing ROI. There is no shortage of statistics that you can find from the data available to track your campaign or web traffic, so the importance is in finding the marketing ROI metrics relevant to your goals.
Are you seeking more brand awareness? Do you want to push leads and conversion to sale?
These are the questions you have to ask yourself to perform a proper analysis of your marketing ROI metrics. While there is some overlap among measurable for each medium of marketing, so we will break our guide to analysis down into Online, Print and Mass Media.
Online
Depending on which web analytics tool you choose to collect your data (Google Analytics, Clicky, KISSmetrics etc.), the more advanced metrics available can vary. However, there are a core group of similar metrics that you should understand based on their significance to your goals.
Reach – The amount of eyeballs your ads have an impression on. This can be an attractive number to present as a positive outcome, but the impact of reach is more difficult to attribute value to than some other metrics. The only way this should please you is if you’re only seeking brand awareness, and even then, it should be used in combination with some of the engagement metrics below.
Social Media Engagement – Engagement metrics can vary in name depending on what platform you’re evaluating. Social media engagement metrics can measure likes (or dislikes on Facebook), shares and comments, which are great for gauging your presence and brand sentiment on social media. The more important engagement metric for measuring your social media performance is click through rate (especially when combined with reach).
Click through rate is a ratio of how many people saw your content vs. how many people clicked through to your website or web offer. Social media engagement is a slower route to sales, but is much more stable. A high click-through rate in combination with a lot of organic reach is always a positive sign for your social media strategy.
Web Engagement – Web engagement is where you track the conversions for your marketing. Similar to reach for your content, web traffic is only useful when put in context. While maintaining a high web traffic, you’ll want to consistently lower your bounce rate (how often people leave your site without visiting at least two pages), raise your average time on site and raise your pages per session.
If you’re not an e-commerce business, it’s also very important to analyze the traffic to your conversion pages. This is where you ultimately want all of your traffic to end up, contacting you with their questions or trying to do business with you. If these pages rank among the top pages on your site, you know that you’re driving customers to the right place.
Most print advertising platforms will provide you with an estimate for the amount of impressions you’ll receive when you market your business with them. Using these numbers and the web traffic or conversions gathered from your unique URLs and phone numbers will allow you to create another version of a click-through rate.
This will be the most useful metric for measuring the effectiveness of your print advertising. These ads are geared more towards brand awareness, so while you won’t be able to fully measure their ROI in the short-term, measuring these marketing ROI metrics against the GRP and other platforms can be effective.
Mass Media
Much of the same can be said for mass media that was said for Print. When seeking conversion, these simply aren’t as measureable as an online campaign. Many people will feel inclined to look directly at their sales to evaluate the changes in their advertising, but there are far too many external impacts on your sales to properly evaluate your marketing with them.
For brand awareness, you can use ad recall tests in combination with an ad’s estimated reach, but that can be a more costly procedure.
One final metric to pay attention to is one that applies to any style of advertising. It requires you do determine what your desired outcome is for any campaign. That could be a click on social media content, a submission on a web form, a call or visit from a unique URL or phone number or even 1,000 impressions. Whatever it is, you’ll then find out what you spent on each instance that achieved that outcome.
Cost Per Desired Outcome
The ultimate marketing ROI metrics for all of these platforms are versions of a cost per desired outcome. This will allow you to break down how much each lead or impression cost you, and once you determine the value of that customer, it’s much easier to determine your marketing ROI. As long as you have specific, thought-out goals with your marketing plan, a cost-per metric makes the performance of creative or strategy easy to evaluate.
These are the basic marketing ROI metrics you’ll need to understand and focus on when evaluating your strategy and execution. In the coming weeks, we’ll cover what conclusions you should draw from them depending on your marketing goals.
If you have any other questions about analyzing your marketing metrics, click here to get in touch with an idig Marketing expert.
