Testing and Measuring Marketing Campaigns to Improve Results

April 10, 2018

One of the biggest mistakes that companies make today when it comes to marketing is failing to measure the performance of their campaigns. After all, if you do not measure how your marketing efforts are performing at present, how are you supposed to know if your money and efforts are being put to good use? How are you supposed to know what improvements you should make going forward? Measuring the success of your marketing efforts is a must, and here are some tips to help you do so…
Experiment frequently – Experimentation presents you with various chances to accelerate the growth of your business. Testing is not merely designed to provide insight; it is designed to give alternatives as well. There are a number of different approaches you can, use, and the test-and-learn approach is one of these. You should take one action with a targeted group, and then another action or no action at all with a control group. This is a simple method and by comparing the results you can easily see the impact of both options.
Avoid vanity metrics – The next tip is to make sure you stay away from any metrics that distract your business from the ultimate goal. In a lot of cases, press release shares and Facebook fans are a good example of this. Yes, such metrics may be impressive, but do they correlate to revenue? If not, you are wasting your time on vanity metrics. Instead, you need to focus on engagement metrics, as these will actually equate to return on investment. After all, when you gather the right data, you make better predictions and you save time in the process. If you are unsure regarding what metrics to go for, some of the best ones to start off with include conversion rate, bounce rate, search engine traffic, page views, and unique visitors. Your number of inbound links can also help, however, you need to make sure that these are quality links. If you have lots of irrelevant links coming from low authority websites, this will do nothing for your business.
Use a professional service – Last but not least, one of the easiest ways for you to determine how your campaign is performing is to use the services of a professional digital marketing agency. A professional firm will have the tools, software and experience to measure many metrics regarding your marketing efforts to determine where you are going wrong and where you are going right. They will then have the expertise to put these actions into place so that you can improve your marketing efforts.
Hopefully, you now feel more prepared when it comes to measuring the effectiveness of your marketing campaign. If you follow the tips that have been presented above, you should be able to determine whether your campaign is performing successfully, and what you can do to improve it.

Mark Asquith

That British podcast guy, Mark is co-founder of Captivate.fm, the world's only growth-oriented podcast host. A Harvard, TEDx, Podcast Movement and Podfest speaker (amongst many more!), he's a wildly approachable Brit and Star Wars/DC Comics geek.

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