Even the most amazing marketing campaigns can benefit from careful metric analysis to ensure your agency’s efforts are correctly aligned with your client’s business goals. Tracking and reporting each marketing campaign activity will help you better understand how one part of the campaign impacts another, making it easier to fine tune campaign performance and improve end results. Key performance indicators (KPIs) are the metrics your agency needs to track at each stage of the sales funnel to evaluate performance. But in order to pick the right KPIs, you’ll need to be clear about the campaign’s goals and the marketing channels your agency will be using.
Identify key marketing channels.
In order to maximize the return on your client’s marketing investment, your agency needs to first determine which channels are most relevant to track. Is the campaign goal to boost referral traffic through a robust thought leadership program where content pieces are published on leading industry sites? In this case, you’ll be using Google Analytics to measure referral metrics and track social network referrals. Is the goal to increase organic search ranking by improving on-site content quality? Google Analytics will still be useful here, but you’ll want to hone in on organic search traffic and bounce rates. Is the goal to drive sign-ups for an upcoming webinar? You’ll want to add click-through rates to your metric measurement.
Measure the most relevant metrics.
The type of marketing campaign and the campaign’s end goal determine which metrics will be the most useful KPIs. Once you’ve clarified the end goal, get started with these metrics:
Referral traffic: These metrics are especially useful for thought leadership campaigns on industry websites and social media. For example, the audience on Facebook versus LinkedIn may respond very differently to your content. Which site is driving the majority of your referral traffic? How can you adjust content to improve referral traffic from weaker sources?
Bounce rates: Pages with high bounce rates mean that the content on these pages does not meet user expectations. While bounce rates may not be the best KPI, this data point is a useful learning tool. Did you drive visitors to a specific page only to fail to provide the expected information? Stop users from leaving by identifying what went wrong in the process and correcting accordingly.
Click through rate: This metric is most useful when campaigns end with a clear call to action, rather than a thought leadership campaign that’s designed to raise general brand awareness. CTR determines if the target user is moved to take action. CTR is a must-measure for email marketing campaigns and PPC campaigns.
Erin M ghostwrites extensively on behalf of B2B companies to support their content marketing and thought leadership campaigns, and her clients range from major Fortune 500 companies to small business startups. When not crafting custom content solutions for her clients, you can find her adding stamps to her passport, scuba diving, or perfecting her secret cheesecake recipe.
