What is the main thing in marketing? Of course, efficiency. It’s not enough to launch an advertising campaign – you also need to competently analyze it and draw the right conclusions from this analysis.
A marketer has a great variety of metrics in his hands. Which ones should you pay special attention to when analyzing a marketing campaign, and which ones can be ignored?
4 metrics that will say a lot about the effectiveness of promotion
The ultimate goal of any advertising campaign is to increase profits. Promotion for the sake of promotion is a bad idea. Therefore, the metrics that definitely need to be tracked are somehow related to return on investment.
Each project has a specific budget for promotion. And advertising campaigns should be planned based on its planned size. If during the process costs begin to suddenly increase or decrease, this should alert the marketer, since with a high degree of probability such a situation indicates that something has gone wrong.
The second metric that should never be ignored is conversion. It is important for analyzing the effectiveness of both advertising and websites and various types of landing pages. In the first case, by measuring the conversion, we can evaluate the quality of communication and the adequacy of the selection of keywords and audience selection, and in the second, the quality of the content and usability of the resource.
The next important indicator follows from conversion to lead – lead cost. This metric partially shows how much the investment in promotion pays off. At the same time, you need to keep in mind that in different areas the norm is a different average cost per lead: when launching a campaign to promote a new residential complex, you should not focus on the cost of attracting a lead when advertising cat food. This is perhaps the main indicator of the effectiveness of an advertising campaign, so all actions to optimize it should be aimed at reducing it.
And a complete picture of the return on investment will be given by the ROI indicator. The higher it is, the more effective the campaign was.
These are the main metrics that will help you understand how good the promotion is and whether the budget is being spent effectively. Other indicators – micro-conversions, bounces, time spent on the landing page and others – can be analyzed less zealously.
Or even turn to them only in cases where, during the analysis of the main metrics, some kind of failure is revealed. However, you need to remember that, for example, a high percentage of failures and a short time spent on a resource lower it in search results.
How to analyze different lead sources
We found that the effectiveness of promotion largely depends on leads. Now let’s look at the different sources of attracting them (promotion formats) and the metrics that need to be analyzed first in each case.
The solution for “advanced users” is end-to-end analytics. If configured correctly, this tool will help not only qualitatively analyze the effectiveness of promotion, but also save your advertising budget and your time. Bonus: the freed up hours can be spent on solving more important business problems.
What is end-to-end analytics? This is a platform that combines statistics across all promotion channels and gives a complete picture of conversion. In its primitive form, it looks like a comparison of the advertising budget with sales data. But it’s better not to stop there and implement a more advanced system that integrates the company’s services, all marketing channels and analytics systems.
Ideally, an end-to-end analytics system should take into account not only the indicators of online promotion channels, but also data from offline activities. Then it will provide comprehensive information about the path that the client took from seeing the advertisement to making a purchase.
But in fairness, it must be said that not everyone needs end-to-end analytics. If a company uses only a few advertising platforms and has a rather modest budget for promotion, then at this stage it is too early to introduce end-to-end analytics. But for a business that actively uses different channels and spends serious money on it, end-to-end analytics is a real must-have.
Advertising on the Internet
- Conversion to lead
- Cost per lead
- ROI
SMM
- Conversion to lead
- Microconversions
Email newsletters
- Conversion to lead
- Number of transitions to the site/landing
Referral traffic
- Conversion to lead
- Cost per lead
- Number of leads
- ROI
- Number of transitions to the site/landing
Offline advertising
- Number of hits
Offline events
- Number of leads
- Number of transactions
SEO
- Number of leads
- Number of transitions to the site/landing
Five mistakes a marketer makes
An illiterate analysis of marketing activity will not allow you to find weaknesses and increase the efficiency of promotion, which means that investments may not bring any results.
One of the biggest mistakes marketers make is not analyzing all targeted user actions on the site or not doing it in full. For example, track only requests from the site and ignore calls. It often happens that a marketer simply forgets about four basic metrics:
- consumption
- conversion
- cost per lead
- ROI.
It is important to sometimes pay attention to indicators such as bounce rates, time spent on the site, and microconversions. They do not require hourly attention, but from time to time it is worth conducting a global analysis, without losing sight of a single detail.
Also, a large number of ad impressions, transitions to the site and good click-through rate, unfortunately, do not guarantee high campaign efficiency. It is worth drawing conclusions about the effectiveness of promotion, using, among other things, indirect indicators.
And, last but not least, seasonality. Yes, yes, it’s stupid to expect high efficiency in advertising for skates in the summer and roller skates in the winter.
