“Strategy” is one of those terms that everyone seems to be throwing around these days. If you do have a digital strategy in place, there is this never-ending itch in a modern marketer or business owner’s mind… the constant question - “Is it really working?”
Whether you’ve got a polished full blown strategy and campaign set up or you’re just starting to map one out, it’s crucial that you have a framework to measure your strategy’s efficiency as this will guide and bring you towards reaching your goals.
So how do you evaluate a digital marketing strategy?
Start with your Goals
It’s rather evident to consider that if there is a question about evaluating, a set of metrics does already exist. And exactly goals to be analyzed and evaluated in the first place, as they turn to be the key aspect of your marketing strategy. If you happen not to have any, re-doing them is the best option.
Every digital strategy and campaign is influenced by business goals—which are almost always financial and/or brand elevating (or ladder up to financial growth).
Your business goals shall have a huge impact on your marketing objectives. Are quarterly revenues and profit margin goals in place? And how many sales transactions are required to achieve those goals? Based on your average conversion rate, how much traffic is needed to achieve the required volume of sales? These are just some of the questions that you might need to answer to be sure you are designing your aims properly.
And now… measure
If you’re about evaluation of the effectiveness of your digital marketing strategy, looking at the numbers is the first step to make.
From first glance may seem, that there is so much data in your analytics tool that it can be distracting and hard to realize where to start from. Luckily, we’re about to take you through main tips: where to find the data and what metrics really matter:
- Revenue (sales revenue)
- Profit margin (the really important stuff)
- Number of transactions (sales volume)
- Sales conversion rate (% of traffic that transacted)
- Goal conversion rate (% of traffic that completed specific actions)
- Users (people)
- Sessions (traffic)
Start with basic metrics
Simply put the key metrics—like traffic, bounce rate, average session duration, conversion rate, number of conversions, and revenue—these will give us a glance of the campaign performance.
Next up…Marketing Acquisition Metrics
So we got the basic metrics, but where did these numbers come from? Here are the things to look at:
- What channels are driving the most traffic to the site?
- What channels have the highest bounce rate?
- What channels have the lowest bounce rate?
They’re getting in but is it performing?
Ok, so we know how much traffic we’re pulling in, and where it is coming from. What about determining how much of those traffic was the “GOOD TRAFFIC’’. We do this by looking at the volume of traffic and the conversion rate for traffic from each marketing channel.
Things to look at:
- What channel has the highest volume of conversions?
- What channel has the highest conversion rate?
- What channels aren’t converting?
Who are these awesome people who are loving our campaign?
While you’re evaluating your digital marketing strategy, you might also want to dig into the audience analysis tab within Google Analytics and revisit your target audiences — find out who’s actually converting.
Things to look at:
- What audience has the highest volume of conversions?
- What audience has the highest conversion rate?
- What audience isn’t converting?
Diving deep into analytics, whether you’re using a social media business tool or your good ‘ol Google Analytics, is not just a positive reinforcement for your campaign but also really fun. Especially when you see strategy works well.
Every business will have its custom dashboard of relevant metrics, but there are a few common ones that are relevant to almost every business:
- Sessions (traffic)
- Users (people)
- Conversions
- Conversion rate
- Sessions by channel
- Conversion rate by channel
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