How to Measure Your Marketing Effectiveness

Good marketing will generate a lot of data and information, but how does one then use that to quantify whether or not a marketing campaign has been a success? Should it be measured by increases in sales? Number of views and clicks on a website? Number of times a post or video is shared and thus how big an audience has been reached? All of these are possibilities.

Below are some ideas for how to measure the success (or failure) of your own marketing efforts.

1. Make Use of Professional Marketing Services

An on demand market research platform will offer clarity and organisation to your marketing information, helping you to better navigate and understand its implications and what the next advisable steps would be. Such clarity on your marketing data acts as a clear indication of success or failure.

The fact is that some people simply don’t realise just how much an online market research platform can tell them. It’s not just what they report, but how they present it and offer additional perspective, explanation and insight. That’s the value-added difference between such a service and using, for instance, free data services such as Google Analytics.

2. Click-Through Rate Vs. Bounce Rate

If you’re making efforts to market your new website or other online platform, then looking at the click-through rate (CTR) and the bounce rate are good indicators as to how you are doing. For your website, the bounce rate refers to the proportion of visitors to your site who landed on the homepage, and then navigated away from your site at their next move. It’s as though they “bounced right off” without reading or navigating through your own site.

Therefore, you want your CTR to be as high as possible, with customer behaviour showing that they clicked on various sections of your site to read more; accessing your product list, online store, and more. A high bounce rate means you’re marketing might be bringing people in, but the page itself is not keeping them. See “Delivery and Open Rates” further below for more on CTR.

3. Likes, Shares and Replies

If you’re promoting content via your social media platforms, then your key currencies of success are likes, shares and replies. Among these, shares are the most valuable because it increases your audience exponentially. On a platform like Facebook, if one person shares a post you make on your company page, that’s anywhere from 200 to 1000+ people who will now see that shared on that person’s personal feed.

Likes and replies generate interest in your post, which can drive it higher in people’s feeds. That’s good since these posts will tend to target people who have already expressed an interest in whatever you’re offering. Social media can really be a marketers dream, but no likes, no shares, and no replies/comments means no real success.

4. Cost Per Lead and Conversion Rate

This point is critical in all forms of marketing. The cost per lead refers to how much you spent in order to get certain eyeballs on your content. The conversion rate refers to what proportion of those eyeballs click through and purchase your product or service. If one lead converts to a sale, does it pay for the cost of that lead? If so, then it’s at least not costing you. If one conversion pays for the cost of 100 leads, then it’s a more successful marketing approach.

5. Delivery and Open Rates

Finally, if you’re using email campaigns, then you can check the delivery rate and open rate to see if they’re working. If your delivery rate is low, it means they’re all going to spam and therefore may never be seen. If your open rate is low, then people are ignoring them anyway. Beyond that, CTR makes a return here because a really successful email campaign has not just high delivery and open rates, but also high CTR, and hopefully a conversion to sale by the end!