Peter Drucker, a management thinker is often quoted saying,” you cannot manage what you cannot measure.” However, for the sake of this checklist to measure the performance of your digital marketing, we will go further and echo the words of Lord Kelvin, a physicist and mathematician of the 20th century, “What is not defined cannot be measured. What is not measured, cannot be improved. What is not improved, is always degraded.”
In digital marketing, you need to define what success looks like following your digital marketing efforts and find ways of tracking this to successfully measure the performance of your activities and eventually improve them. Otherwise, your efforts will be useless.
Here is a 7 step checklist to measure the performance of your digital marketing campaigns that will ensure your brand management efforts pay off.
Step 1 – Start by determining your business objectives
What are your business goals? Pro-Tip: Every single person in your organization must be aligned with regard to your business objectives.
Furthermore, ensure that your business objectives are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound (SMART Objectives).
Each business will have goals unique to their needs. However, the top 5 business objectives that may advise your marketing efforts are:
- Revenue Growth –
This is the % increase in your sales revenues from one period to the next that you are aiming for. An example of SMART objective is: To generate 28% revenue increase from online sales between 1st and 31 December compared to a similar period last year. - Customer Satisfaction –
This is the extent to which your product or service meets or exceeds your customer’s satisfaction. - Return on Investment –
This is the ratio between the net profit you make and the cost incurred to make that profit. It can be used to measure the effectiveness of an investment. - Customer Retention –
Customer retention rate metrics are a measure of the number of customers that your business continues to do business with over a given period. It is closely related to repurchase rates and that too can be a business objective. - Customer Acquisition –
Customer acquisition is the recruitment of new customers into purchasing your products or services. It involves bringing consumers down the marketing funnel from brand awareness to purchase decisions.
Step 2 – Map your business objectives to Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) This is identifying key metrics that you can easily use to track and measure your identified business objectives.As a demonstration, the table below maps out the various digital marketing KPI metrics that can be used to track the business objectives identified in step 1.
| Objective | Some Possible KPIs |
| Revenue Growth | Online sales per day, online sales per region, online sales per channel, and, online sales per period. |
| Customer Satisfaction | Customer satisfaction score, Net Promoter Score, and Sales team response time. |
| Return on Investment | ROI Value and ROI Rate |
| Customer Retention | Repeat purchase volume and Repurchase Rate |
| Customer Acquisition | Conversion Rate, click through rates, Cost of Customer Acquisition, leads to SQLs ratio, SQL to closed customer ratio, and Check out abandonment rate. |
KPI setting for your business objectives should take into consideration all the activities, products, or services showcased via your digital presence e.g. Website, App, Landing page, Social media, Et cetera. This can range from simply creating brand awareness or positioning or it can be results-oriented like generating leads and increasing conversion rates. Step 3 – Measure Having identified the most appropriate metrics that you need to track, you will need to identify tools that capture these metrics and start tracking them. Most digital and social media platforms already have their inbuilt tools for analytics and you may just need to employ them. In other cases, you will need to employ the use of 3rd party tools and in extremely rare cases, build your own using APIs. Step 4 – Optimize The digital space allows for real-time optimization of marketing efforts. As you track and measure what is working, optimize your efforts for maximum gain. Simply tone down what is not working and amplify what is working. Simply ask: How are my metrics doing? Am I missing anything? Was anything redundant or unnecessary? Figure out what you can do better, make modifications, and then keep measuring to track results. Keep asking yourself: Are my metrics helping me address my business objectives or do I need to rethink them?
Step 5 – Determine your reporting
You will need to determine an appropriate method for reporting your progress to your team and business stakeholders. This includes what to report, which reporting tools are appropriate, and the regularity of reporting.
If you are reporting to business stakeholders with little digital experience, then reporting on a monthly basis using a presentation slide deck whose contents simply map out the overarching digital contribution to the rest of the business works. This could be your board or your senior management officials like CEO, President, or CFO.
Nonetheless, if you are reporting to stakeholders who are well versed in the digital space and thus their decision-making will be aided by the granular details of your marketing activities then it is best to report metrics down to the platform level. If social media reporting granular details even at the post level is ideal. Such stakeholders could include but not limited to your CMO, SEO specialist, account managers, and business partners. The reporting tools could range from spreadsheets to presentation slides. It will depend on the kind and amount of data being presented.
Step 6 – Use team and business stakeholder feedback to improve and experiment
Your team and your stakeholders may challenge you or give you insights that simply never occurred to you. Take this feedback and improve your digital marketing efforts. Furthermore, you can experiment to determine what might work better. One great way that you can experiment to improve your digital marketing performance is:
A/B Testing – This is when you compare the original version of the item (AD Creative) to a newly changed item (Green CTA instead of previous Blue CTA).
A/B testing helps you see how your change performs in comparison compared to the original. It’s the most ideal way to prove if something you suspect will work better actually works better or not.
Step 7 – Rinse and Repeat
When all the above steps are executed correctly, it is assured that your digital marketing efforts will be contributing to your business’s bottom line. The final step is to ensure that you have noted everything that works for your business in the previous six steps and replicates them moving on. This will create a proven system that you can repeat over and over again to drive results.
To learn more about running high-performance digital marketing campaigns, call us on 0721314242 or email [email protected].
