The challenge of correctly finding out the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns in our multi-screen generation has become the biggest challenge for marketers. Do you target the commuter in the morning or evening, or maybe the lunchtime audience, or even targeting different audiences with different messages?
The greatest asset we have at our disposal is data, but how do we harness the power of this information to fine tune our digital marketing activities? A recent study published by ComScore claims that 46% of online display advertising is wasted because the consumers do not see it. Understanding data is vital to understanding the touchpoints that your audience have with your brand before they make a conversion.
In a recent study, the IAB describes how today’s digital marketing has flattened the traditional marketing funnel, “Engagement is not a single event, but more of a continuum, of interconnected gears.” So when creating your marketing plan, it is important to treat it as a story where you can create compelling user journeys from the data you collect which will plan out each stage of the sale funnel.
In today’s multi-screen landscape we can measure a success of a campaign on a daily basis; gone are the days where we have to wait for consumers to hand in their vouchers at the till to determine the success of a campaign.
Paid Per Click advertising, in particular, is an excellent example of how a brand can measure the success of a campaign on a daily basis. So, what can we measure on a daily basis and what actionable insight is available when managing your PPC campaign:
Keyword performance
- With the correct goals set up and with a clear knowledge of your KPI’s, Google Adwords allows you to look at the click-through-rate and conversions of your keywords. These two metrics make it possible to remove any keywords with a low CTR, so your account is left with the best performing keywords.
Quality score
- Quality score is Google’s measuring of the relevance of your keywords. It looks at factors such as CTR, relevance of ad content to ensure that search term is defined clearly in the promotion or offer.
Click-Through Rate
- The CTR tells us the percentage of people who have seen your advert and have clicked through to your landing page. More importantly, it tells us whether or not your ads are relevant to searchers. Low click-through rates show us that the adverts are not relevant to people searching for the keyword.
Wasted Spend
- The search term report allows you to look at what keywords and search term your users clicked. More importantly, it shows you the cost of each term. If you find any keywords that are not relevant to your brand but you are paying for, you can add these to the negative keyword list.
- Negative keywords allow you to filter out traffic that is not relevant to your brand.
Google Analytics is a powerful tool to analyse the performance of your multi-channel digital marketing campaigns on a daily basis. It allows you to make better decisions based on data rather than historical success. However, this leads onto one of the biggest and most common mistakes that digital marketers make. To successfully track these campaigns the must be correctly tagged.
Once you know how to track your campaigns, you need to understand the best ways of gaining insight from the data you collect. The following Google Analytics dashboards can help:
Acquisition Overview
This report gives us an overview of the top channels sending visitors to your website. It also gives you a top level view of the behaviour and conversion details for each channel.
After correctly tagging your campaign the acquisition report looks at how each channel has driven conversions on your site. The insight from this will allow you to understand how to distribute your marketing budget.
Campaign Report
The campaign report tracks the visitors who come from campaigns you have set up. The three required fields to track campaign are the campaign name, the campaign/traffic source, and the campaign medium. Google’s URL Builder will generate tagged URLs for you.
The great thing about the campaign report is that it gives you a real-time glance at how your campaigns are performing against your key metrics. For example, you can compare the performance of your PPC and Twitter campaign, which could help you decide which channel is performing.
It is clear that if you want to increase the ROI on your marketing spend it is vital that you can check the performance of your digital marketing campaigns. Google Analytics and Google Adwords are excellent tools to help you achieve this.
