How to measure campaign success

It might seem like creating and executing a marketing campaign is the most important part of marketing, but how do you know if it is successful? Without measuring success, how do you know what went well, what could have been better, and how to improve? In short, you don’t, but in this blog I will go over some ways to help you measure campaign success.

1. Define Campaign Goals

Depending on the size of your brand and its goals, you may have multiple marketing campaigns running at the same time. Because of this, without clearly defined campaign goals, it can be very easy for campaigns to be jumbled and not obvious what is going on for each one. Have a document with specific campaign goals and objectives makes it easy for marketers to see what is trying to be achieved with a campaign. You also need to set times to periodically review data throughout the course of the campaign to remain on track. Having the time frame of your campaign in the same document is also a good idea to keep everyone on the same page.

2. Determine KPIs

“KPI” is perhaps one of the most overused marketing terms out there. So we know it means key performance indicators, but what are they and how to we use them? A KPI can be anything from how many likes your Instagram post got to how many people purchased a product from your online shop. There are dozens of KPIs, so which ones you choose to track for a specific campaign boils down to what you are trying to achieve. If the overall goal of your campaign is awareness, specifically on your website and social medias, then you would want to track page views, where web traffic came from, social media follows and views.

3. Select Tracking Tools

Now that you know what you are wanting to track, you need to have a tool to collect the data. There are several softwares you can use to track data, however many of the places you are putting out content have tracking tools build in. For example, all social media platforms have analytic data, and usually a professional dashboard for businesses with more data. A lot of website hosting sites have data analytics built in, but you can also register your website in Google Analytics for free to have access to detailed data about viewers of your website.

4. Adjust, Optimize, and Analyze

You know what to track and how to track it, so now what? It is important to check how your campaign is doing throughout it, so setting dates to review data is a good idea. Compiling your data into one place can help streamline the process of reviewing data to adjust and optimize your campaign. There are several sites that have tools to help keep all your data organized. Within this, you want to look at the KPIs you chose, and compare them to where you planned them to be. For example, you wanted to increase your social media impressions by 10% in the next three months. If you check in at the one month mark, and you have only increased impressions by 2%, you may need to evaluate your strategy and adjust it to be able to still meet your goal.

Conclusion

If there is one thing I hope you take away from reading this, it’s that you need to have a solid plan in place to track metrics before even starting the campaign. Throughout the campaign, you need to still be flexible to change things, but having a set “road” to follow is extremely beneficial to a marketing campaigns success.