Assessing the performance of your marketing channels: Key metrics to track

When measuring your marketing activity and campaigns, not all metrics are considered equal. You could be focusing on the wrong metrics to make strategic decisions. Here’s our guide to keeping track of your marketing campaigns and how to track them properly.

You need to track your marketing campaigns to find what’s working and how successful the campaign, you’re running is. By tracking your marketing campaigns, you’re able to measure your campaign effectively, respond to any changes in real-time and plan better for future activity.

To do all this, you need to first begin by planning. In this case, what channels you are going to monitor to collect all the valuable data for your overall digital marketing performance. You will need to decide on what is most important to client to do this and use the best monitoring tools.

Another requirement is to have clear branding throughout the whole campaign by using unique hashtags and keywords to track the campaign more effectively. Another element is to have constant and clear communication with the client on what elements you are tracking and how successful the campaign is going. Aim to set clear and achievable goals with your client so that you’re both on the same page.

The last stage is to set up monitoring alerts on the specific keywords and hashtags you are using within the campaign. This will allow you to collect the data you are wanting to collect and will be the most useful.

When the campaign is well underway, you will more than likely need to use monitoring tools for the amount of mentions from your ads – you will need to track this, and it can be very time consuming to do it manually.

When the conversions happen, you will need to react to this in real time to almost shape the conversation to fit within your campaign. This can be done by building further brand awareness, possibly exploring the wider area of the product/service you’re advertising. For example, a company advertising barbecues could find existing content discussing cooking appliances or even articles on summer activities and then putting the product forward for recommendation.

One thing you need to remember during the campaign is to report to your client often, so they know what’s going on and how well you’re performing for them. A good thing to report to them is the key metrics of the campaign, such as mentions, reach, and sentiment of the interactions – so that the client knows what’s been said about the campaign, how many leads they’re gaining and whether the interactions have been positive, negative, or neutral.

We asked our Senior Performance Marketing Executive, Cris Chen, for her advice on what the key metrics to track are and here’s what she said: 

“It really depends on the client you are working with, but I would say that the key ones to focus on would be ROI (Return on Investment) & CPA (cost per action).” 

Amongst those mentioned above, other metrics that should be tracked are qualified leads, number of comments, the amount of content that is being shared, the cost of acquisition for your customers, net promotor score and your monthly recurring revenue.  

There are various tools available to help track the performance of your marketing campaigns and to assess the results, here’s our recommendations.

•  Cyfe
  • This tool is best used by marketing or social media managers. It allows you to monitor the finer details of a website or social channels all on one screen.

• Klipfolio
  • This tool helps smaller and growing businesses. It provides easy to read and digest data for all your social channels.

• Raventools
  • This tool is best used for enhancing SEO for a company. It takes the hassle out of SEO and effectively proofreads your SEO for you.

• Geckoboard
  • This tool is for project managers and digital marketing managers. It helps to measure the marketing performance of your team and puts your KPI’s in a more visually pleasing and understandable manner.

• BOSCO™ Connect
  • BOSCO™ Connect combines all your internal marketing data with extensive algorithmic modelling to create personalised reporting dashboards. The easy to use interface provides a single source of truth and enables marketers to make better digital marketing spend decisions using data driven insights.

In additional to connecting all your digital marketing data, BOSCO™ uses your data and predictive analytics modelling to forecast where to spend budgets in both new and existing channels for maximum efficiency. Book a demo to find out how BOSCO™ can help your business.