Measuring the true success of a digital marketing campaign

Many people judge the success of a marketing campaign on the last interaction a person makes before they make the sale or an enquiry. Reporting systems such as Google Analytics report in this way. For example you launch a Facebook ad campaign you see how many enquiries or sales your campaign has generated in the last month. It has produced very little so you turn it off and it is determined to be not successful. But what if that Facebook ad actually encouraged more people to search for your website and make an enquiry? Turning the campaign off you may be missing out on potential enquiries or sales.

The online buying journey is more complicated than ever before. A typical user can visit a website 5 times before making an enquiry or purchase and for higher value items this could be a much as 36 times throughout the year.

Customer journey behaviour typically falls into 4 categories:

1. Research
2. Awareness
3. Intent
4. Action

A good example of a how this translates into a consumer online buying journey is below.

A person is thinking about getting a new car. They look on a few car review sites and identify a few potential car models. Then 3 weeks later they see a Facebook ad on their news feed promoting a dealer deal on one of these car models and they click on the ad. They view the dealer website and remember this.

Then that weekend they go car shopping again, this time with more intent and type into Google the car models they are looking at. They click on a PPC ad and view the dealer website again and leave the website to compare other competitor deals. Then later that weekend they type the dealer brand name directly into Google, click on an organic SEO listing and fill in a test-drive request form.

Which marketing channel gets credited with test drive request? Most reporting systems would say it is the Google organic listing. But what about the Facebook ad that encouraged the person to start car shopping again? Or the car model PPC ad that brought them back to the dealer website? They also contributed to them to filling in that test drive request. There is also the offline to consider they may have also seen car ads in their Sunday newspaper, which may have lead them to search in Google.

Therefore it is important to not judge a book by its cover when measuring the success of your marketing campaigns and using an online marketing attribution reporting system will help with this. This will help to capture a more complete online journey by allocating weighting to each marketing channel throughout the journey.

To find how we can help you to create and measure a successful digital marketing campaign for your business please give us a call on 01202 330000