The 5 most important metrics we use to guide digital campaigns
When you’re looking for metrics to evaluate the success of a digital campaign, there’s a vast sea of information available, and it can be hard to separate the useful from the superfluous.
Of course, what’s most useful for your campaign is going to vary based on your goals. Your content can be as sleek as you want, but without a clear, strategic vision it’s not going to serve a purpose and could end up costing you more than it was worth.
So how do you measure your marketing results? If you Google it, you’ll get thousands of answers about click-through rates and bounce rates and cost. While these metrics aren’t unimportant by any means, they don’t always tell the complete story of your results. With that in mind, here are five metrics that we find most valuable when interpreting results:
- Branded vs. non-branded keyword performance. It’s crucial to understand how people are finding you online. Your keyword data can be a great place to start when determining where to steer your marketing efforts. If the majority of your ranking keywords are branded (i.e., they include your company name, one of your products and/or proprietary terminology), you should look at converting that traffic as well as evaluate what non-branded keywords you could pursue in order to expand your reach. If your keywords are largely non-branded, you may have an awareness problem.
- New vs. returning visitors. It takes an average of 7-13 touchpoints to convert a B2B buyer, so it’s essential to hit people more than once with your content. We want to make sure we’re constantly generating new visitors with our content while also providing follow-up engagement opportunities that net return visitors.
- Top-performing content. Your campaign can do double duty for you as both marketing and market research. One easy method is placing articles about two different topics on a landing page. If one article gets significantly more clicks, you can use that to steer the next piece of content you create.
- Customer loyalty. Loyalty is important because it’s tied to revenue growth, and there are a few ways to measure it. Net promoter score (NPS) is the most sophisticated, and can typically be captured through a customer loyalty survey. Some more approachable options that you can capture during your campaign include social media likes, comments and shares.
- Form completions. Tons of eyes on your content, a slough of shares and comments, excellent name recognition—that’s all great, but lead generation is the real meat of a digital campaign. Once a user fills out your form, you’re able to take a more active role in the outreach, not to mention the fact that you can automate the nurture path through an email tool like Pardot or Marketo.
A digital campaign can be an incredibly effective way to move the needle for your business. There’s no faster, more cost-efficient way to generate a large number of high-quality leads than with a sleek campaign. Learn more about how Centerline can help concept, launch, and evaluate your campaign with our SPARK campaign kit.
Greg Harbinson
Group Strategy Director
