How to measure the success of a marketing campaign

Marketing is an essential pillar of any business plan, but it’s not always obvious how well your marketing campaign is actually working. 

Some people don’t think much about it, while others take business growth as a sign of a successful marketing campaign without ever finding out what’s working, and what’s not. 

In this guide, we’ll be sharing some simple techniques you can use to measure the success of your marketing campaign. Specifically, we’ll be talking about:

• Website traffic
• New vs returning traffic
• Number of sessions
• Length of sessions
• Page views
• Conversion rate
• Social media engagement 
• Email open rate
• Return on investment (ROI)

Online traffic is a measure of how many people have visited your business’ website. Most online marketing campaigns funnel users back to your webpage, so measuring traffic is a useful metric to see how successful it has been. 

The best thing about measuring traffic is that it’s instantaneous, you can see exactly how many people visited your website every day, making it an accurate metric. 

On top of the volume of traffic, it’s also useful to know where the traffic came from. In other words, the reason that customers were led to your site. Knowing the specific source of traffic will let you know what marketing strategies are working, and what ones aren;t.

When measuring success, it’s important to know how much web traffic is being produced by new visitors, compared to returning visitors. 

Lots of new visitors mean your marketing campaign is successfully drawing in new potential customers. 

On the other hand, the number of returning visitors is an indication of the overall quality of your site’s content. 

A session is a term used to describe how many times per day people visit your site. For example, if you visit a site once in the morning, then again in the evening, this would count as 2 sessions. 

Essentially, it measures how often people use your site so it can be a good indicator of public interest. 

The amount of time people spend on your site per session is another important metric, but the desired results will vary depending on what kind of site you have. 

For example, social media sites like Facebook or Youtube take long sessions as a sign of success. They want people engaged for as long as possible, 

On the other hand, if you’re selling a product or service, you’ll probably want users to find what they need quickly and easily. For sites like these, excessively long session times could mean that the site is difficult to navigate. 

You can also measure the number of actual pages users have viewed on your site. This will let you know which pages users are finding most relevant and which ones are being ignored entirely. 

You can also measure the exact point at which users leave your website. This tells you a lot about the user experience and how helpful your content is. 

More specifically, you can measure:

• Exit rate – exactly where users left after looking at your content, telling you where they lost interest. 
• Bounce rate – the percentage of people who leave (bounce away) from your website after viewing only one page

A high bounce rate is a big red flag for marketing campaigns and needs to be addressed quickly. Reasons for a high bounce rate could be:

• Excessive loading times
• The user didn’t find what they were looking for
• The user wasn’t compelled to keep searching your site
• The user was following a product link that led to a home page

Conversion rate measures how many new customers have viewed your site directly because of ad interactions. There are a number of ways to measure conversion rates, and it’ll depend on what you’re trying to do. 

Businesses could measure conversion rate by one or more of the following:

• Sales
• Subscribers
• Downloads
• Leads
• Website views

Social media is a great marketing tool. It’s free, easy to use, and pretty much everybody is on at least one platform. 

It’s also fairly simple to measure social media engagement because the platforms themselves will tell you exactly how many followers, likes, comments, clicks, or shares you’ve had. 

As the name suggests, email open rate measures how many people are actually opening the emails you send them, instead of leaving them untouched in their inbox. 

A low email open rate could mean that your emails are:

• Poorly titled (with unattractive subject lines)
• Sent at the wrong times
• Sent to the wrong groups of people.

ROI refers to the amount of money you’ve spent on a marketing campaign (investment) compared to how much new business it has generated (return).

It can be tricky to pin down an exact figure, but you can calculate your ROI by adding up:

• Cost per click
• Cost per conversion
• Cost per acquisition

Measuring these will be different when you’re using an in-house team or an external marketing company. 

When using external marketers, they’ll usually charge your business every time one of their publications gets interaction like the kind we’ve listed above. Then it’s a simple case of comparing the amount you’ve paid them compared to how much income it has produced. 

When you’re using an in-house marketing team, it’s a case of comparing their wages to the amount of interaction they have generated. 

A successful marketing campaign will bring in new income streams, which will inevitably lead to more complicated bookkeeping. 

Financial management can be stressful and time-consuming when you’re self-employed. That’s why thousands of business owners use the Countingup app to make their financial admin easier. 

Countingup is the business current account with built-in accounting software that allows you to manage all your financial data in one place. With features like automatic expense categorisation, invoicing on the go, receipt capture tools, tax estimates, and cash flow insights, you can confidently keep on top of your business finances wherever you are. 

You can also share your bookkeeping with your accountant instantly without worrying about duplication errors, data lags or inaccuracies. Seamless, simple, and straightforward! 

Find out more here.