Measuring Marketing Performance

Measuring marketing performance is key to running a successful business. If you choose not to track your performance, you will never know if you meet your business goals. SEO Design Chicago will discuss how to measure your marketing performance and what essential metrics you should track. 

Performance in Marketing 

Marketing campaigns take effort and planning. Before measuring your marketing performance, you have to set campaign goals, choose marketing performance metrics, set up marketing performance tools, and start to measure your performance.

Set Campaign Goals

Begin by setting up SMART marketing goals. SMART goals are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-based.

Specific

Write down your goals. Your goals should refer to a specific part of the business. The more detailed your goal, the more likely you are to achieve it.

 To help you set specific goals, ask yourself these questions:

• Who is involved?
• What do I want to accomplish?
• Where is it located?
• Why is this goal important?
• Which limits or resources are involved?

Measurable

Goals should be measurable so that they can be quantified and easily tracked. You can use tools to help you measure and track the progress of your goals on an ongoing basis.

Attainable

Goals must be realistic and be achievable based on your skills, resources, and time frame.

Relevant

Goals must be relevant to your business. If you can’t handle your goals, they are irrelevant.

Time-Based

Goals should have a time frame and deadline. Without a deadline, you are less likely to achieve your goals.

Choose Marketing Performance Metrics 

Performance metrics help you quantify the progress of your goals. Marketing performance metrics or KPI (key performance indicators) are one way to measure how well you’re meeting your business goals.

Set Up Marketing Measurement Performance Tools

It’s much easier to measure digital marketing efforts than traditional marketing like billboards and magazines. Because digital marketing is internet-based, you can track marketing performance via analytics tools such as Google Analytics, SEMrush, and Ahrefs, for example.

Measure Your Marketing Performance

Now that you have set your goals, decided on your KPIs, and set up your marketing materials, you can begin measuring your performance.

Marketing Performance Metrics

What are key performance indicators (KPI)?

KPIs are quantifiable measurements used to gauge a company’s overall long-term performance. They help determine a company’s strategic, financial, and operational achievements.

Marketing KPIs

Marketing KPIs include sales revenue and cost-per-lead.

Sales Revenue

Calculate how much your inbound marketing has brought to your brand by using your total annual sales minus total revenue from your inbound marketing.

Cost-Per-Lead 

Calculate how much you’re spending to acquire new customers. Costs include advertising, sales, and marketing efforts.

Organic Search KPIs

Organic KPIs include engagement metrics and conversion rates.

Engagement Metrics

Examples of engagement metrics include:

• Time spent on site
• Number of visits
• Which pages were visited
• Bounce rate

Conversion Rates

Examples of conversions rates include:

• Account registration 
• Completing purchases
• Call to action (CTA) engagement 
• Landing page visits

Brand Awareness KPIs

Brand awareness KPIs include social media reach, impressions, and mentions of your brand.

Social Media Reach

Social media reach tells you how many people see your content posted on social media.

• Number of active followers
• Relative effectiveness on different platforms
• Online reach beyond social media

Impressions

Impressions are the number of times a person is presented with your ads or paid social media ads. The quality of the ad influences impressions. 

• Relevant keywords 
• Content quality 
• Brand bidding

The difference between reach and impressions can be confusing. To clarify, reach is the number of people who see your content.  Impressions would be the number of times the search engine displayed your content, no matter if a user clicked on it or not. 

Brand Mentions

The more you’re mentioned by influencers, other brands, and customers, the better. Brand mentions cultivate brand awareness and growth.

Content KPIs

Content KPIs include time on page, page views, and the number of subscribers.

Time on Page and Page Views

The more engaging and valuable your content, the longer someone will stay on your page. You can also gauge your content by how many people view your page.

Number of Subscribers 

New subscribers to newsletters and podcasts show that your content is engaging. People are interested in the content you’re putting out there.

Email Marketing KPIs

Email marketing KPIs include open rate and click-through rate (CTR).

Open Rate

Open rate is the number of people who open your email. If you have a low open rate, your subject lines aren’t engaging enough.

Click-Through Rate (CTR)

This measures how many people clicked over to your website after reading your email. Engaging body copy and a call to action (CTA) will entice clicks.

Customer Satisfaction KPIs

Customer satisfaction KPIs include net promoter score and customer retention.

Net Promoter Score

A net promoter score uses an 11 point scale to measure how satisfied a customer is with your company. The score also measures how likely customers are to recommend your brand to others. You can acquire this data via a survey.

Customer Retention 

Repeat purchases are a great indicator that you’re doing something right and have satisfied customers.

There are many other KPIs you can track. It’s essential to do your research and decide which KPIs would most benefit your business or company.

How to Measure Marketing Performance

Now that we’ve established some KPIs you can measure, the next step is to measure your marketing performance. There are all kinds of analytics tools to measure your marketing performance. 

Marketing Performance Management Software

What is marketing performance management software?

Marketing performance management software provides features and functionality to analyze data, make predictions, and optimize marketing programs, campaigns, and resources. Marketing performance management has BI tools, analytical workbenches, dashboards, optimization, and more. 

Additionally, this software helps businesses make more innovative sales and marketing decisions. It provides insight and strategy in one service. The software enables you to align and improve the performance of your marketing efforts. Marketing performance software can:

• Align marketing performance to predefined goals.
• Connect marketing performance to financial performance.
• Optimize spending, which regulates marketing activities and assigns a budget.
• Ensure meaningful measurements by providing an unbiased approach to employees based on individual performance.

Marketing Analytics Platforms

Let’s take a look at some of the marketing analytics tools available today.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics helps you understand how people use your website and apps. This information can help you improve your visitors’ experience.

• Analytics intelligence: Get answers to your questions about analytics data and insights on how your business is performing.
• Reporting: Understand how customers interact with your website and apps. Share your insights with a variety of reporting tools.
• Data analysis and visualization: Access, organize, and visualize your data.
• Data collection and management: Organize and manage your data.
• Data activation: Make smarter marketing decisions based on your data.
• Integrations: Work seamlessly with other Google solutions and other products. 

Klipfolio

Klipfolio allows users to create interactive dashboards that can host marketing-related data from various tools and channels. You can track your performance by pulling from Facebook or Google Analytics. 

• Keep your marketing performance metrics in one place.
• Bring context to your conversations and rely on data for your decision-making. 
• Import and modify your data.

SEMrush

SEMrush is a marketing analytics tool to help you see what your competitors are doing. It provides a simple way to monitor competitors’ social media accounts and brands.

• Keyword research: Discover all the best keywords to target and bring traffic to your website.
• Content marketing analysis: Assess your content performance to identify areas of improvement.
• Competitor analysis: Improve your performance with competitors’ strategies.
• Market analysis: Analyze your position and get ahead of your competition.

BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is a content and social media analytics dashboard. It provides users with data about trending topics on major social media platforms. 

• Every social media is different. Use BuzzSumo to compare what content resonates on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
• Discover by domain. Enter a website address and find the most shared content from a specific organization.
• Discover by time and analyze changing trends. You can measure a range of periods, such as the previous 12 hours or across several months.

MixPanel

MixPanel can track events on your website, mobile app, or product. This information will tell you what your users are doing on your website and mobile app.

• Understand your users’ behavior better.
• Quickly segment and visualize your data. 
• Measure the success of your product launches.

Cyfe

Cyfe is an all-in-one real-time dashboard. It allows marketers to keep social media, marketing, analytics, and sales all in one place.

• Pre-built dashboard templates
• Widgets to connect to Google Analytics, Google Ads, and Salesforce accounts
• Fully customizable and flexible for your specific needs

Optimizely

Optimizely is an excellent tool for carrying out A/B tests on web pages and products to know which version is best. A/B testing helps understand your users and increases your ROI. 

• Create, tailor, and scale content on the best-in-class enterprise.
• Run multiple shops, inventory, and a catalog online or offline.
• Use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to test new features and personalize every touchpoint. 

Without measuring your marketing performance, you’ll never know if you’re reaching your business goals. You should constantly monitor your KPIs to get a complete picture of how your business is doing. Be sure to take advantage of all the analytics tools available and utilize the tools that best fit your business.

Measure Market Performance With SEO Design Chicago

SEO Design Chicago can assist you in measuring your marketing performance. We offer digital advertising services such as search engine optimization, web development and design, content creation, and digital marketing consulting.

FAQ:

• Why is measuring marketing performance important?
• What are SMART goals?
• What is a key performance indicator?
• Which analytics platform is best for you?
• What marketing performance metrics should you monitor?