How to Measure the Success of Your Digital Marketing Efforts

You have set up your website. You are posting daily on social media. But is it enough? How do you measure the success of your digital marketing efforts? How do you know what you are doing is enough for your brand to succeed in the digital world?

To consistently make your digital marketing efforts have a positive effect on your brand, you have to monitor, track and analyze the goals you had set up originally in your digital marketing plan. Sample goals can be:

• increase the number of unique visitors by 7% within 3 months
• decrease bounce rate by 15% within 6 months
• increase the traffic from LinkedIn (referral traffic) by 12% within 2 months and so on.

Try to set up S.M.A.R.T. goals – these will help you calculate the expected goals vs. actual goals more efficiently.

Have you simply forgotten or just neglected to set up goals in your digital marketing plan?

Now’s as good a time as any to do something about it!

Assuming you have set up your goals in your digital marketing plan, here’s how you can track and measure the success of your digital marketing efforts:

1. Google Analytics

Google Analytics (GA) is a treasure trove for data analysts. You can also set up goals in GA itself, and you will get notifications whenever the data is ready to be viewed.

My way of using GA is to set up Custom Reports and then going back to these reports whenever I am ready to measure my digital marketing efforts for any particular brand.

Some reports you can set up are:

• Traffic by Source
• New Vs. Returning Visitors
• Average Session Duration
• Bounce Rate
• Most Popular Pages or Landing Pages

If your goals are not being achieved as per your expectations, look into the content you have on your website. Revise your content strategy to make your website perform better.

2. Leads by Source

How many people are using the contact forms you have set up in your website? If you have a WordPress website, you will find there are plugins that will store the inbound messages. Or you can easily connect your contact forms directly to your email marketing client like Mailchimp or Constant Contact.

This will help you understand the efficiency of your website forms.

If the goals are not being achieved, look into the placement and call to actions related to your forms to make them more effective.

3. Reach and Engagement on Social Media

Facebook Insights, Twitter Analytics, LinkedIn Analytics, there is even Instagram Analytics for you to monitor your digital marketing efforts on your social media.

And if you want to dive deeper into data analytics, you can try tools like Brand24, LikeAlyzer, Union Metrics, etc.

If your goals are not being achieved, look into the times you are posting your content on your social media – is your audience online at those times? Are you sharing others’ content? Review these and tweak your social media strategy accordingly.

4. Email Open Rate

Email marketing clients like Mailchimp, Constant Contact, etc. offer detailed analytics on every campaign you send out, so it becomes quite easy for you to grab the data you need for your analysis.

If your goals are not being achieved, look into optimizing factors like email design, call to action buttons, mobile views, etc.

Over to you…

There are, of course, various other digital marketing metrics you can use to set up your goals and measure your efforts in. The above are just a few that can help you get started in data analytics for digital marketing.

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