Tracking Marketing Campaign Success

Tracking the success of any marketing campaign should be considered before you even start putting your messaging or creative together. Even if it’s just getting an idea of what kind of results you think would class it as a success or not.

So start by determining what sort of outcome you’re looking for - is it enquiries, traffic, sales or engagement? Or something else?

The objective obviously depends on your type of business, but can be different based on what the reason for the campaign is. If it’s to increase sales, the measurement is likely to be sales conversions, but if it’s to increase profit, maybe it’s more along the lines of increasing the life-time value of a customer (LTV), or even reducing your marketing spend (ROI).

Once you have an idea of what you should be tracking, you then need to work out how best to track the data.

Digital Marketing

If you’re using something like Facebook or Google Ads then their suite of tools include the ability to track some of these things. However, I’d strongly recommend using a tool that can combine the data from multiple platforms and mediums, because although Google Ads might be working for you at the moment, it might not continue to be as effective in a couple of month’s time and you’ll need to switch how you’re doing your reporting - making it difficult to compare results.

For most Digital Marketing campaigns a website analytics package is probably the best route to go for most businesses, so the ubiquitous Google Analytics is good for most uses.

Offline Marketing

Whether it’s an advert in a trade magazine, a sales letter, a leaflet or business card, you should be tracking the success of these too. Who knows, handing that business card out at a networking event could result in 3 sales and you’d never know otherwise!

The way to do it for printed material is to setup a campaign URL to tie it into your web analytics - and let me explain that in more simple terms with an example…

Jane’s networking business card

Jane is business consultant, and wants to track the success of her new foray into business networking, so she creates a business card with a small promo on her services (50% off an initial consultation). So she puts the offer on her card with a unique web address just for this campaign: janetheconsultant.com/biz50.

While that has been sent off to the printers, she gets her page setup on the biz50 address. Now, this can simply be a redirect to her homepage or be a completely customised ‘landing page’ for this campaign - talking about the specifics of business networking and the benefits of the offer.

On this page, however, is some analytics code that is tracking the number of people that hit the page and those that fill in the form (or even give her a call). Once this is all setup she can forget it and get on with her networking.

A month or so later she can fire up the analytics software and review the stats on the number of people that took a look at the page and the number that got in touch - measuring the effectiveness of the campaign. By linking this to the number of sales she generated (using CRM/Marketing software like Reldesk) from each enquiry, she can determine what her return on investment was.

But it doesn’t have to stop there. Once the lead and contact is in her CRM system she can continue to monitor the Lifetime Value of those customers.

Jane’s Results

Maybe 50% of the customers go on past the initial consultation and become customers for a good number of years. That £40 per month for 6 months (£240) generated a return of £25,000 over the lifetime of those customers.

Or maybe it doesn’t. Maybe she works out that only 5 people came onto her landing page, and of the 2 people that got in touch, 1 used her 50% consultation promo, but decided not to take it further. So that £40 per month for 6 months (£240) generated a return of just £200 - resulting in a profit of -£40 and an additional 4 hours per month over 6 months!

But at least she knows whether the campaign was a success or not! She can also use the information from that marketing campaign to decide what she does for the next one with some data and intelligence, rather than guessing!