Sometimes perfecting your marketing plan can feel like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole… or like trying to move an oversized couch up a narrow flight of stairs with your two best friends. Having the ability to take digital marketing analytics and turn them into actionable insights can be just as important as hiring a team of professional movers who know how to pivot on that narrow staircase.
Digital marketing is fantastic because it is diverse, affordable and customizable. As you plan for 2020, make sure you know what your key performance indicators, or KPIs, are. Go beyond vanity metrics and get to the heart of the matter. Instead, use metrics that translate to real dollars and cents. What are your goals? Increased sales? Site traffic? Inbound calls? A mix of all these? These are all measurable, trackable metrics. You can see how your digital marketing campaign impacted those goals nearly in real-time.
What can you measure?
While there’s a time and place for follower count, comments and likes, there are more pieces to the metrics pie. Think of it like a traditional English trifle. Imagine every flavorful layer combining for a goooood experience. Here are a few things you can measure:
Impressions: How many ads were served
Clicks: How many people are clicking on my ad
CTR: Click-Through-Rate
Click-Thru Conversions: Times users clicked on an ad leading to your website and visited a page or completed an action
View-Thru: Times users saw an ad, did NOT click, but then came to your website later and visited a page or completed and action
How can you use these metrics?
If you haven’t made the jump to digital, you’re missing out on the ability to collect and apply KPI information in real-time. Digital campaigns are agile. With traditional media, you most often have to complete the campaign to gather KPIs. That’s not the case with digital marketing. If for any reason your campaign is underperforming, analytics can show where there’s room for improvement. And instead of waiting for your campaign to end, you can pivot at any time to enhance your marketing ROI.
But what does this look like? Let’s say you’re a B2B financial organization. You’re running a digital campaign centered around a product that’s yielding a strong CTR right out the gate. That’s great! But three months later, you run another digital campaign for a different product that at first glance isn’t performing as well. This second campaign is yielding a lower CTR than the first one did. Remember that metrics English trifle? A closer look shows that your second campaign is killin’ it in the view-thru department. Turns out, your audience plays the long game with products that have an element of relationship building.
Fortunately, you didn’t have to wait until after the campaign wrapped up to get these numbers. You were able to analyze and optimize your campaign performance, finally providing an answer to the age-old question, “How you doin’?” Turns out, things are going great!
While all this data is wonderful to have, without someone to interpret and apply it, this is all a moo point. That’s when having a team of digital marketing experts makes all the difference. Barcelona Creative Group speaks analytics, knows the power of creativity and we’ll be there for you. We don’t just create your campaign and gather the data, we provide real insights and reporting that you can understand.
Need a Friend who knows digital? Let’s talk.
