How to measure effectiveness of marketing activities
The biggest mistake many companies still do and the one thing that can actually make a difference for your business, is not measuring and following up your marketing activities. In some cases, companies still – despite the digital age that we live in – even lack a why, to who’m and clear KPI’s with their different activities.
Even though you may argue that your business have limited resources both in terms of money and time, I say it’s in that context even more imperative that you actually assign both a purpose and a KPI to your marketing activities. This so you can follow-up in any analytics software what your investments actually generate for you.
If you can’t follow up on your marketing, you don’t know if what you are doing is working. Focusing on vanity metrics such as clicks, views etc in not sufficient to understand if a campaign is delivering business value for you.
This is a cornerstone and such an obvious thing to have in place, that it have never occurred to me, until recently that I need to address this on my blog. But it’s now started to dawn on me, that this is still lacking in different types of organisations today, that I just had to write about this. I hope I can help and educate others on how to set this up and how to get started. So let’s start with the basics of why you need this.
The benefits of following up your marketing:
- You get full insight on how many sales or leads (or whatever else the end goal of a campaign is for your company) a specific activity generates for you
- You get full insight in if a marketing supplier, channels etc that you invest in deliver value to your business
- You will be able to make better media investments and distribute your budget more holistic depending where in the customer journey you may need to invest more, or less
- Drive revenue by doing more of what works
- Find a focus
- Optimize your marketing activities – from media mix selection to creative and communication
- Run experiments and pilot campaigns before you make larger investments, hence being able to spend your marketing budget more wisely by running initial tests
You do not need to invest in any complicated software, chances are that you already have Google Analytics installed. If so what you need to to, in order to follow up on your marketing activities are the following:
- Install Google Analytics, if you don’t have this already
- Install Google Tag Manager, which helps you track and “install” more tags and tracking on your website in a more orderly fashion
- Ensure you have goal tracking (on the end goal, such as sales or forms filled in) and events for interaction elements that you’ like to track on your website (such as video views or downloads)
- If you have an online shop, activate enhanced ecommerce for Google Analytics
- Decide on a framework that you will use to tag your links with. I only use campaign source (for example newsletter) medium (email) and name (autumn_2018) as not to complicate things.
- Tag your links using Google URL builder
- Post your content, campaigns etc
- Follow-up in Google Analytics
You may need help for a few hours of a developer that can help set-up the tracking on your website, but this is not a huge investment and long term you will earn that money back, just in a few months. In terms of the insight you now have.
If you don’t want to log in to Google Analytics and drill down to the data. You can do one of the following:
- Drill down once in your Google Analytics account and save the URL and just update the parameters when you have to
- Invest in having a custom view set-up for you in Google Analytics with only the data you need to see
Summary of free Analytic Tools that you can use:
Google Analytics – to track the interaction with your website
Google Tag Manager – a “container” for scripts and tracking. Helps you install new tags and scripts on your website without having to ask a developer for help
Google URL Builder – to tag your campaign and marketing URL’s so that you can track them in Google Analytics
Google Data Studio – free tool for data visualisation (limited functionality as this is more for reporting purposes) but a free tool to make custom views and reports
Not measuring and following up on your marketing activities is an investment you cannot afford NOT to do.