How do you determine success for your marketing campaigns? Many small business owners or business executives unattached to digital marketing would most likely say a successful marketing campaign will be determined by the quantity of traffic generated or the number of leads brought in.
That is not necessarily the best way to determine the successful results of a marketing campaign.
Instead of measuring your campaign effectiveness by the sheer volume of results, try measuring your campaign by the quality of the results you create.
The following key performance indicators listed in this blog are a great starting point for you to determine the success of your campaign.
Quality Traffic or Sessions (Content, Search Engine Optimization, Website Experience)
Ask any small business owner about one of the more desirable items they wish for about their website is more traffic. They believe that if their website gets 1,000,000 traffic sessions per month, they will deem the website a success and will reap excellent results for their business.
That is half true. Yes, getting 1,000,000 traffic sessions to your website is great. By sheer odds, you will get a percentage of that audience to convert on your website. However, you will receive a lot of garbage traffic that won’t mean anything to you or your business.
1,000,000 sessions to your website are not as valuable as 50,000 sessions from the right audience. If you get traffic that matches the characteristics of your buyer persona, the odds are you will get more conversions than from that smaller load of traffic versus a broad amount of traffic.
The advice for business owners is to not attribute the quantitative amount of traffic as a key performance indicator, but rather break it down to be more specific by determining your key performance indicator as to the number of the right traffic.
You can measure the quality of your traffic by looking at your bounce rates in Google Analytics. If your website gets lots of traffic but has a bounce rate of above 75%, you may need to analyze what is causing your traffic to exit your website. Is there a content issue? Is the user experience of your site not optimized. Once you determine the issue, set up AB tests and determine whether the change makes a difference compared to the control.
Cost Per Lead Acquisition (Paid Media)
There is always a critical juncture of whether to continue running a lead campaign or not. Is the campaign financially worth running? What do you look at to determine this?
For paid lead campaigns, you should look at the cost per lead acquisition as a quick indicator of whether the campaign is worth running.
Let’s say if you’re a company that provides clients in the insurance industry with leads on home insurance. The clients will pay you 100 dollars per lead delivered to their sales team.
You run a $10,000 Facebook campaign that targets new homeowners that receive a 2 dollar cost per click. That means with this budget, you received 5,000 clicks to your landing page. Assuming you have a 25% landing page conversion rate, you will deliver 1250 leads to the client, with your end result being a gross revenue of $125,000 for the campaign. If you subtract expenses, you netted $115,000 profit with a cost per lead being about $8.
Let’s say if your cost per lead is $150 on the same campaign. That means you would only generate 66 leads, giving you a result of $6,600. Subtract your expenses, and you’ll find that you lost $3400 on the campaign.
If you realize that your cost per lead acquisition is starting to become uneconomical like the cost per lead is greater than a single unit of your product, it might be a good idea to consider pausing your campaign or looking for a more efficient way to acquire your leads.
Quality Email Subscribers & Email Lists (Email Marketing)
For an inbound marketing strategy to be successful, a strong email subscriber list is a must. Acquiring emails from website visitors is the sole purpose of inbound marketing. You want to capture people that are familiar and want to learn more about your brand. The more people you have on your list, the more captive traffic you will have to your website, and your chances of conversion will increase.
However, the same notion that applied to using traffic as your key performance indicator also applies to email marketing. It’s better to have an email list of engaged email subscribers. It’s great to have 100,000 email subscribers but if only 10% of them interact with your emails, you essentially only have a list of 1,000 emails.
By creating a great email sign-up on your website and delivering quality content that the reader will enjoy, you will create an email list that is sustainable for your business. However, it is impossible to keep every email subscriber happy. You will get some bad emails or unhappy readers that will want to unsubscribe from your list. In order to keep a quality email list, you need to perform periodic maintenance.
The way you maintain an email list is by removing bounces, unsubscribes, and auditing your content so you constantly push out deliverables that keeps the reader entertained.
Lead Quality (Inbound Marketing Funnel)
This is probably the most important metric for inbound marketing considering the main idea of the methodology to generate leads that are interested in your product. Again, hitting on the paradigm of quality over quantity, the total of leads you generate is not necessarily the best metric to measure campaign performance.
You should consider the quality of the leads you generate more important. If you are running campaigns or generating website content that doesn’t take your ideal buyer persona into account, you will run the risk of generating a large number of leads that won’t convert because your product or service won’t solve their problem.
If you have a lead form that includes a reward like a free pdf guide download or an amazon gift card to obtain user information, you may get a few leads that leave a bogus phone number or email. This defeats the purpose of inbound marketing because now you or your sales team cannot reach out to contact the lead.
There are two things you can do to help mitigate this risk.
If you are offering free downloads, obtain the user’s information through a lead gen form and then push them into an email automation flow that allows them to download the lead magnet from the welcome email.
If you use this practice, you will at least be able to contact the lead through email because if they supply you with a bad email, they won’t be able to get the free download.
You can also judge lead quality by following up with your sales team. If the sales team tells you that the leads are uncontactable because of bad information, a language barrier, or simply are not interested in your product or service, something is wrong. Either your ad messaging is wrong, or they are more interested in obtaining the lead magnet you are promoting instead of your product or service.
Conclusion
There is a little more to measuring any campaign success by the quantity of the deliverable you receive for the monetary value you put in. If you take a look at the quality of the traffic, your email list, and the leads you generate overall, you’ll have a better barometer to determine whether your inbound marketing campaign was a success or not.
