When it comes to understanding and communicating how successful an online marketing campaign is, both to yourself and your coworkers, colleagues, or to your company at large, there are seven key sets of numbers that you should track regularly, calculate, and present. Doing so will allow you to easily gauge success factors and plan your next steps. In the paragraphs below, we discuss these seven metrics and just why they are important.
- Absolute Numbers
Absolute numbers are just that, straightforward listings of the key metrics that apply to your campaign. Absolute numbers include the number of visitors to your site, leads generated, accounts opened, revenue achieved, profits, and so on. Tabulating these absolute numbers is the first place to start when beginning to track your metrics and then present them to others. - Change
Change relates to percent increases and declines and relevant multipliers. Are the absolute numbers moving month over month, or day to day? Are there certain hours that see regular changes during the day? - Growth
Growth—in numbers of unique visitors, traffic, or retweets—is a key measure of success. When you can see running averages and growth rates, these let you predict trends related to your campaign and viewers and lay out trend changes that will help you with forward projection. - Lift
Lift is measured as a percentage, and is a key metric to gauge how well a campaign is working. When we talk about lift associated with campaigns, we are talking about the associated change in a certain metric due to a specific activity over the time period of that activity. Lift is essential to understand how much more products or consumers are converting due to certain marketing/advertising efforts. If there is a lift in sales, you need to attribute that lift to some specific activity. If you launch an online ad campaign on date X and there is a correlated increase in orders placed on your site on that date, than you have a case of lift associated with your campaign. You can use a test/control methodology to find out the lift in conversion rate due to advertising. With this method you would ask, how likely is someone to buy a product if he or she has not seen any advertising and compare that to how likely someone is to buy a product if he or she has seen your advertising? The percent difference between the two is the lift from the advertising. - Incrementality
Incrementality, or an incremental change, is very much associated with lift. With this metric, you are further showing what a lift in sales, or other metric, was specifically caused by and the extent of that lift. The main difference between lift and incrementality, is that incrementality deducts the pull-forward effect from lift, essentially identifying the specific change associated with a marketing activity. A case is presented here that shows a good example: Let’s say you are in the coupon campaign business. You launch a coupon that is heavily used. But if the lift in overall sales during your campaign is later offset by a drop in sales after the campaign is over, you can assume that your coupon users are already customers and your campaign merely pulled them forward to buy earlier. In that case, the incremental change is absent and your campaign was not a success because the campaign did not expand your customer base. To establish whether an incremental change has taken place, you need a holdout cell to find out the fraction of similar prospects who would ordered anyway. A successful campaign is one in which there is a sales lift between recipients and control, not total sales to the control. - Rates
A rate is defined as a ratio in which two measurements, often expressed in different units, are related to each other. In B2B marketing, rates tend to have to do with some version of how many visitors came to a website and how many converted into leads. The key marker of this metric is the conversion rate, the ratio of visitors who convert casual content views or website visits into desired actions based on requests from marketers, such as sign-up for a free account, or register to a webinar. In the case of a B2B marketing campaign, you obtain a conversion rate by dividing the number of visitors who took the desired action (filled out a form) on web page by the total number of visitors to the specific web page (visits). For example, if a web page was visited 100 times and one person filled out a from (became a lead), then the resulting conversion rate would be one percent.
There are a number of other rates as well, such as click-through-rate, the number of clicks on a link (text ad, banner, button) as a percentage of the number of times this link was delivered (impressions), or loaded; view-through rate (VTR), an estimation of the number of impressions viewed during an advertising campaign; mail open rate, a (not-perfect) measure used as an indication of how many people viewed or received an email; response rate (also known as completion rate or return rate) which refers to the ratio of number of people who answered a survey divided by the number of people in the survey’s sample; and retention rate, the rate at which a given web site retains the same unique visitors, month over month, or over a specific period of time. - Cross Channel Effects
Cross-channel effects are the effects of marketing efforts in one channel on purchases made through other channels. This could be, for example, hearing an ad about a car on a radio and seeking more information leading to a purchase through the car manufacturer’s web site.
Optify recently released its enhanced reporting application that will allow you to generate customizable reports to capture the different metrics we presented above. You can sign-up for a free 30-day account to take advantage of Optify’s Real Time Marketing suite.
