How to Measure Success with Marketing Analytics

Having a marketing strategy and executing it doesn’t mean much if you don’t know how to measure success with marketing analytics.

Whether you are a DIY marketer or have an on-site or external team (like us!) running your marketing efforts for you, focusing on your analytics is a MUST. Simply put, if you’re not measuring the effectiveness of your campaigns, how will you know whether your marketing efforts were worth the time, energy, and money you put toward them?

As the year comes to a close, it’s important to review each of your marketing channels to see what worked and what needs to be revised for next year. The good news is, it’s easy to know how to measure success with marketing analytics as long as you know what to look for.

Below, we’ll take you through the key metrics you should review when measuring the effectiveness of your marketing strategies.

Introduction to Social Media Marketing Analytics

Understanding which social media platform(s) and what type of content produces the best results for your business is critical in shaping your content marketing strategies, and you won’t be able to do that unless you know how to measure success with marketing analytics.

What we love most about digital marketing is that there are numbers to back your efforts. When you focus on analytics, it’s easy to tell which efforts are paying off and which need more focus or should potentially be eliminated.

If you’re wondering how to measure success with marketing analytics, one of the first metrics you should review is the reach and impressions your posts get. It’s important to know that “reach” and “impressions” shouldn’t be used interchangeably, as they each measure specific data.

Reach refers to your audience—the number of unique users who saw your content. On the other hand, impressions measures the number of times your content was displayed, regardless of whether your audience engaged with it.

Speaking of engagement, what does THAT mean? 

Your engagement metrics refer to the types of action a user took to interact with your content. If someone liked, commented, shared, clicked a link, or saved your post, those are all included in the engagement metrics.

Most social media marketing analytics reporting tools will separate each type of engagement, as well as consolidate all the engagement into one percentage, so you can really take a look at HOW your followers engaged with your content, and whether your content marketing strategies are effectively influencing your followers to ACT.

You should also cross-reference your marketing analytics with the content itself. Some questions to ask as you conduct your data review include:

• What visuals are doing best: graphics, videos, or still images? If you find that video is performing best (it often is), then more of your effort should be focused on creating video content. On the other hand, if you’re taking a lot of time to create beautiful and complicated graphics and they don’t perform well, focus instead on visuals that will provide a better return on investment of your time!
• What type of copy is performing? In addition to visuals, you’ll want to review your captions. Are users responding to the information you’re providing? Do they engage with shorter, quippy content, or a specific theme?

As you review your reach, impressions, and engagement, you’ll get a feel for which social media marketing channels are performing best and will enable you to create content marketing strategies that best support your business.

Introduction to Paid Media Analytics

Paid media is external marketing that involves a paid placement, including pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, branded content, influencer marketing, and display ads.

If you took part in any paid media in 2021 it’s important to assess your analytics on these efforts. Why? Because you paid for it, and you need to know your return on investment!

Similar to your social media analytics, look for reach, impressions, and engagement to measure your success.

With paid advertising, you should also review your:

• Click-through rate (percentage of viewers who click on a link)
• Cost per click
• Cost per conversion (or cost per lead)

If your click-through rate is low and your cost per click/conversion is high, it’s a signal that you need to review the visual, copy, and/or audience targeting of your ad.

Additionally, if you’re using a third party and they can’t provide analytics or trackable results on your efforts, you might want to consider partnering with a different company.

Introduction to Website Analytics

Now that you know how to measure success with marketing analytics for social media and paid advertising, it’s time to move on to your website.

If your website is a templated build from your company, which is common in mortgage and real estate, your analytics will likely be viewable by logging in to the back end of your website. If you have an independent website, hopefully you have installed Google Analytics to help monitor your website activity—if not, make sure to do this moving forward!

There is SO much you can analyze for your website. Here are the main marketing metrics to review:

• Sessions: This is the total number of website visits and will give you an idea of your overall website and page traffic.
• Channels: It’s important to know how users are finding your page. Did they navigate directly to your page by entering the URL in their web browser, or did they navigate to your website from Facebook, Google or another search engine, or other referral pages?
• Demographics: Where are your visitors from, how old are they, and so on?
• Pages viewed: What pages are users spending the most time in? Are potential customers  looking up contact information or reading blog posts? 
• Devices: It’s important to see what type of device your visitors are using when visiting your page and ensuring that the website looks great on any device. 

One metric that often gets overlooked is the bounce rate. The bounce rate is the percentage of single-page website visits. Simply put, it shows the number of visitors who left your website after viewing just one page. The aim is to get this number as low as possible.

A high bounce rate typically indicates an issue with the website, whether it’s a technical issue (slow to load), or the content isn’t compelling enough to encourage the user to explore other pages. If you notice a high bounce rate, be sure to do a deep dive into the usability and content of your website!

Introduction to Email Marketing Analytics

For many businesses, one of the most effective communication channels is email marketing. This is another area that’s important in understanding how to measure your success through marketing analytics.

Some main marketing metrics to review:

• Open rate: If the percentage of email recipients who opened your email is low, you may want to review your subject lines and consider making changes to make them more compelling.
• Click rate and conversion rate: Once the user opens the email, are they reading the information and engaging with it?
• Campaign and automation performance: If you’ve set up an automation, it’s important to review the funnel and ensure that users are moving through it correctly.
• Contact reports, top contacts, contact trends: Understanding WHO your audience is and what emails they engage with can be helpful in shaping future email marketing campaigns.

There are SO many analytics when it comes to email marketing! When you really start diving into the numbers, you can get more strategic with your email marketing efforts.

We hope you enjoyed this guide on how to measure success with marketing analytics. As always, if you need help with your digital marketing strategies, set up a consultation with us by visiting http://bit.ly/RMSConsult.