31/08/21 // Written by AmbaWilkes

How To Measure The Success Of Your Digital Marketing Strategy

More and more businesses are embracing digital. But many invest in their digital marketing strategy without understanding how to measure their efforts. With 34 percent of businesses agreeing they’re not proficient at measuring metrics, there’s little hope of benchmarking your success.

But without these metrics to measure against, how will you know if you’re getting an ROI, whether your budget is being spent in the best way possible and if your strategy is performing how you want it to?

If your aim is to make a lasting impact through your marketing efforts, it’s critical to measure the success of your strategy on a regular basis. In this blog, we share insight into the common challenge of measuring your marketing success.

Evaluate your digital marketing goals

The first step to measuring the success of any digital marketing strategy is to thoroughly evaluate your specific goals. Every strategy requires you to define considered marketing goals that will enable you to distinguish between success and failure.

To evaluate your performance, you need metrics to measure it against. This often means looking back at the previous year and analysing how you performed against your objectives so you can benchmark your efforts. Objectives could include improving your organic ranking, increasing your social following or boosting your conversions.

If you exceeded expectations, take a deeper look at how you managed to achieve this. Was it due to an unexpected rise in demand? Or maybe an element of your strategy performed extremely well? If you have fallen short on one or two of your objectives, consider whether your targets were unrealistic and put yourself on a more achievable path next time.

Measuring channel performance

Evaluating how each channel performs will set the scene of what to focus on. There are always insights to gain which can then be used to fuel your marketing strategy:

SEO

As Google’s algorithms continue to evolve, the organic world has become more complex, competitive and challenging to navigate.

Measuring your SEO efforts ensures you’re getting the most from both your website and campaigns. The pointers below will help you analyse the areas you need to consider:

  • Is your website technically optimised?
  • Are you targeting the most effective keywords?
  • What are you ranking highly for?
  • What are you not ranking for that you would like to?
  • What percentage of traffic is your organic strategy generating?
  • How does your organic position compare to your competitors?
  • Do you have a strong and varied link profile, or could this be improved?

Although SEO isn’t an immediate fix, when done well, it can provide impressive and long-term results to your bottom line.

Paid media

Paid media advertising covers a range of channels from search to social and display which can make proving the ROI of your paid media efforts difficult.

As with any digital marketing tactic you invest in, you want to get the most out of your budget. Determining which campaigns have historically performed well can help you determine where to invest in your paid media for the future. Consider these questions to help you understand how your paid media is performing compared to what you want it to deliver:

  • What is your ROI or ROAS?
  • Which campaigns generated the best results?
  • Which campaigns performed poorly?
  • What is your Quality Score?
  • What is your average cost-per-click (CPC)?
  • What is your average cost-per-acquisition (CPA)?
  • What is your average conversion rate?

Social

Social channels have become an integral part of our day-to-day lives. More than simply a place to consume content, these platforms also entertain, create communities and allow you to shop direct. That’s why a strong social media strategy has become so important to businesses today.

However, when measuring success, it’s important to look beyond vanity metrics such as your follower count and number of likes. Social can also covers various channels so it’s important to look at your engagement across each. Consider how engaged your community are, what type of content performs best and worst, which channels are your favoured and how your feed compares to your competition.

These factors will help you hone your strategy and make tweaks to better performance such as which channels to invest your time into, upping your posts or deploying new, relevant tactics like user generated content.

Content

Content is one of the harder marketing tactics to measure the performance of. How do you understand what role your social media post, landing page or new blog post play in users converting?

When it comes to demonstrating the value of your content, it’s important to remember that not all content is created to drive revenue. It’s often created to achieve specific objectives such as growing your social following, improving website rankings or raising brand awareness.

Content forms the foundations of a website so it’s important to keep it well optimised and consistently updated. If your content hasn’t been performing how you want it to, it could be time to take a look at what needs improving:

  • Does your content follow best practice guidelines that will support rankings?
  • Is your content up to date?
  • Have you looked at whether users bounce off your content or delve deeper into your site?
  • Do you regularly add new content to your website such as blogs and resources?
  • Are you distributing your content effectively?

A content audit can help you create a high-performing content strategy that captures your users’ interest. Analysing which content is performing best for you will give you a steer on your content marketing strategy. It also enables you to reuse your top performers in other formats to really get the most from what you produce.

Email marketing

Despite the rise of social media, email remains one of the most popular methods of keeping contact with your audience. It also provides a variety of metrics to track that provide valuable insight into how your email strategy is performing.

We recommend regularly reviewing your open, unsubscribe and click-through rates to get an idea of what emails are resonating with your audience. If you use your emails to share content with your audience, this tactic can also give you an idea of what users found to be most interesting.

If you want to find out more about email marketing and how to create an effective email marketing strategy, the experts at Wired Plus can help.

The importance of attribution

To gain a realistic overview of how your marketing channels are performing, you need to consider attribution. Have you examined how your brand is being discovered? Which channels are driving the most revenue? Which keywords are performing best?

Understanding the role each channel plays in driving traffic that converts plays a critical role in knowing where your budget and efforts are best allocated. Usually, a customer will go through numerous touchpoints before converting. By taking the time to understand the customer journey, you can accurately give credit to the necessary marketing channels. This allows you to further invest or reallocate budget where it will generate the best ROI.

Did you do better than your competitors?

The online world is a competitive one and users face a huge amount of choice. Your competitors aren’t just those in your market who sell similar products or services, they also encompass media publications, informational resources, blogs and news outlets. Any domain that’s ranking for the same keywords is a rival. That’s why it’s so important to understand exactly who your competitors are to monitor your performance against them.

By conducting a competitive analysis, you can understand where your business sits in the market in comparison to your competition. Our SEO specialists developed an exclusive competitor analysis tool that forms the benchmark of your strategy.

Gathering insight on exactly who your competitors are in the SERPs, our competitor analysis allows us to:

  • Analyse your website’s performance compared to your competition to uncover untapped opportunities
  • Understand your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses
  • Highlight specific pages that need improvement and optimisation
  • Examine your website’s health including page indexing, site speed and Google crawling
  • Identify how many phrases you rank for on the first page of Google

Learning more about who your competitors are and how they’re performing online aids you in not only measuring your digital marketing performance but with making better, more informed strategic decisions too.

Do you know who your real competitors are? Find out with our free competitor analysis.

Informing your strategy for now and the future

Tracking the performance of your digital marketing strategy is crucial to success. A worthwhile task to do, delving into the performance of your digital marketing strategy will provide valuable insights on your target audience and expose the under-performing areas. The insight gathered from this analysis can inform your ongoing strategy into next year and beyond.

Bringing your findings together can underpin your vision for 2022 helping you identify where efforts can be realigned and performance bettered. If you want to find out more about measuring the success of your digital marketing strategy and how to get the most from your budget, contact our team of industry specialists.