Success is obviously the goal of any marketing campaign, but what is success? Well, that depends on the company and what they’re trying to achieve. Today we’ll take a look at how to measure the effectiveness of your digital marketing campaign(s).

The End Goal

Ask yourself: “what is the end goal?” Be honest, too. For 90% or more of businesses the end goal is profit. This is generally simplified into Return on Investment (ROI) to isolate a campaign for analysis.

Now this is not always the case. Sometimes (on rare occasions) a non-profit will want to market. Perhaps a rich journeyman will start a new venture and not really care about it’s success, only that it sees eyes. The end goal doesn’t matter; only that you identify it and be honest with yourself.

Yes, we all want to be friends and have a long-lasting partnership that makes life easier on everyone, but never take your eyes off the prize of what you’re trying to accomplish. Because at the end of the day that’s the common thread linking you.

Now for the hard part:

What If I Don’t Have eCommerce Tracking?

This is the single most common disconnect we see. You want to measure return on investment directly, which requires seeing exactly how much revenue SEO has generated. However, this is impossible to track with complete accuracy. That’s a tough one for the ‘numbers’ people to handle. SEO requires a bit of trust and you have to put some pieces together, that’s just a matter of fact. Unless you have eCommerce Tracking and a payment portal and only accept online transactions then you’re going to be stuck with some guess work.

Get As Close As You Can

If you don’t have eCommerce tracking, measure leads. This includes phone calls, form submissions and anything else that brings in a potential buyer. Then measure your ‘close rate’ for these leads and simply apply it to the number of leads from that channel. This is the most common method used and either involves some simple Goal or Event Tracking.

If you don’t have a form and your site is purely informational, that’s where it gets trickier. After leads, should they be unavailable, we would simply measure Organic Traffic and Keyword Rankings. These are always measurable, so there should be no situation where you can’t use these as a baseline.

To review: Return on Investment > Revenue > Leads > Organic Traffic + Keyword Rankings

In any of these events, Organic Traffic and Keyword Rankings should be reported clearly because they’re always an important part of the equation.

Want to start a Digital Marketing Campaign with an experienced set of agency-level freelancers who will report all of this for you? Reach out to us!