Launching a successful digital campaign is more than just running an ad and dusting off your hands.
You also have to consider its impacts, both positive and negative, on you, your company, and your customers and truly deem a campaign “successful”.
The process of digital campaign success measurement plays a pivotal role in understanding the effectiveness of your efforts.
As the carpentry saying goes, “Measure twice, cut once.”
By analysing and studying these impacts in depth, you can be sure that your investment in a campaign was well spent. Additionally, you can also use this information to make informed decisions about future campaigns.
But how does one even go about the measurement of success for something like a digital campaign?
Understanding Digital Campaign Success Measurement
Well, when it comes to digital campaign success measurement, success itself can be measured in many ways. Depending on your digital marketing objectives, success for you may mean something different than success for another company.
Basically, in the context of digital campaigns, there is no one-size-fits-all success measurement metric.
Irrespective of what you want your ad campaign to do, there are some crucial steps to take for digital campaign success measurement, thus allowing you to deem it “successful”.
So, here’s a step-by-step guide to precisely assessing your campaign’s effectiveness while incorporating the concept of digital campaign success measurement.
1. Set Clear and Measurable Goals
The very first thing you’ll want for the digital campaign success measurement is to set up good goals beforehand.
But what is a “good” goal to achieve? The best thing to remember is that you will want it to be clear, measurable, and specific.
Before even strategising, it is important to set goals that align with your marketing objectives.
For example, if your objective is to increase traffic to your website, you will want to set a daily number of visitors that you want to reach after running your campaign.
There are plenty of different purposes that your ad campaign could serve.
You want to make sure that whatever tactic you are using to measure its success reflects the reason the campaign exists.
Be as specific as you can with these two factors. The more precise you are, the easier it will be to compare your actual results to your goals.
2. Track Website Analytics
If you are doing a digital marketing campaign, chances are you have already figured out your website situation.
In this case, you will want to utilise web analytics tools like Google Analytics to track the various metrics related to the performance of your website. Here are some of the key things to be mindful of:
- Website Traffic:
Measure the total number of visitors to your website, as well as unique visitors, page views, and session durations.
- Conversion Rates:
Track the percentage of visitors who complete desired actions on your website, such as making a purchase, filling out a form, or subscribing to a newsletter.
- Traffic Sources:
Identify the sources that drive website traffic, such as organic search, social media, paid advertising, or referrals.
These can tell you the level of interest and engagement that your product is garnering and the overall performance of different channels, thus offering a measurement of success for your digital campaign when it comes to effectiveness.
Even if the goal you have determined in the last step is unrelated, this information is still valuable for your analysis.
By determining factors that are good or that could be improved upon, you can get ready for the next campaign.
3. Monitor Social Media Engagement
If your campaign includes social media marketing, it is generally a good idea to track engagement metrics on your platforms.
Be it likes, shares, comments, mentions, or follower growth post-campaign, you’ll want to take note.
Analysing social media engagement is also a good measurement for digital campaign success, especially in gauging audience interest.
More than that, it helps you see the effectiveness of your content in driving interaction and brand awareness.
4. Compare Campaign Costs and Revenue
Within the same domain of logic as the last two steps, you should evaluate the financial aspects of your campaign.
You can do this by comparing costs incurred against the revenue generated, basically calculating the return on investment (ROI). A good way to do this is by dividing the net profit from the campaign by the total investment and expressing it as a percentage to better visualise how much you’ve made from a campaign.
By analysing your ROI, you can assess the profitability of your campaign with a good degree of accuracy.
While looking at engagement is all fine and good, at the end of the day, you are still running a business. Ensuring that you’re turning a profit and not losing money is a fantastic measurement that the digital campaign had some success.
5. Assess Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Assessing your key performance indicators, or KPIs, goes hand-in-hand with the last few steps that we just discussed.
KPIs could include metrics such as click-through rates (CTR) for emails, cost per click (CPC), cost per acquisition (CPA), return on ad spend (ROAS), or even engagement rates on your social media platforms.
Once you have determined a successful benchmark in your categories, like engagement or revenue, you can define specific KPIs.
This will allow you to measure the success of your digital campaign against predetermined criteria, thus evaluating its performance on a clearer level.
6. Regularly Review and Optimise
Now, the final measurement of success for your digital campaign is regular reviews and optimisation.
Continuously reviewing the performance of your campaign against your goals and KPIs is crucial to measuring success. You don’t want to do it once or twice per campaign; you want as much data as you can have.
The more data, the more specific your future goals, and the easier it is to identify areas for improvement.
In return, it allows you to refine your campaign elements in real time and see how these changes affect effectiveness.
Conclusion
In conclusion, there is no one way to define digital campaign success measurement.
Nevertheless, with these steps, you can be sure to get a measurement of the effectiveness of your campaign in several different ways, ranging from engagement generated to profits made.
Leverage the data available, utilise analytics tools, and track the success of your digital campaign to make better, more informed, and optimised decisions in your future ventures.