online marketing analyticsYou work hard to keep your content marketing machine fueled up. Your blogs are optimized for SEO, you’re killing it on social media, and your inbound marketing strategy is generating leads. The final component in your new marketing campaign strategy is to review your campaigns with analytic tools. Which campaigns were the most successful? How do you prove the value of each campaign?

The beauty of online marketing is that data from every action your visitors take is tracked and stored on a computer somewhere. This represents a tectonic shift for marketing strategy. Rather than setting vague goals, like “increase brand awareness,” or relying on your gut to decide how well your ideas are working, marketers can now use data to dissect campaigns, and glean true insight into their ROI.

With the ability of online marketing analytics to prove, and improve, campaign effectiveness, it’s easy to see why 54% of industrial marketers spent more on online marketing in 2013 than they did the year before.

The key to successful marketing is accountability, and being able to learn from every campaign to improve the next.

Integrating Analytics into Your Campaign Strategy

To measure the results of your marketing campaigns, you need to look at your performance data. Site analytics will help you improve your marketing strategy and collect insight on campaign performance, such as:

  • How well your campaigns convert visitors and leads
  • How specific marketing campaigns are faring compared with one another
  • How effectively your campaigns are delivering ROI and revenue

The specific metrics that will best predict your campaigns effectiveness will vary by your business and target market. For a complete picture of your campaign’s performance, be sure to look at a variety of measures, including: traffic, submission and conversion rates; raw data such as total new leads and engagement by channel (e.g., how many total tweets or likes did a campaign achieve); and comparative metrics such as new leads vs. contacts.

Beware of “paralysis by analysis.” Dive deeply enough to be thorough, but use common sense when looking at your numbers. Your newest email campaign could have a 5% clickthrough rate. Wow! But if 90% of those people are clicking on the unsubscribe link, your email is actually a giant failure. Be sure to look at what your data means, in addition to just the hard numbers.

Measure the Actual Business Success of Your Campaigns

The ideal online marketing analysis tool should give you insight into the real business success of your marketing efforts. Whether you use a free service like Google Analytics, or invest in an integrated marketing automation software package like Hubspot, be sure you can tell certain things about your website traffic, such as:

  • How people first found you
  • Which critical touch points ultimately led to a conversion
  • Which of your marketing campaigns generated the most sales

After all, the point of any marketing strategy is to bring in revenue. In order to see the ROI of that strategy, you need the proper tools to guide you along the way. Marketing analysis is the report card of your campaign’s success.

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