How to measure your digital marketing performance

When it comes to your digital ecosystem, it’s a good idea to run a monthly or quarterly health check to evaluate the effectiveness of your digital marketing efforts. This includes how well your website is operating, the performance of any paid media campaigns, your overall SEO health and more. 

The purpose of running a ‘health check’ is to understand and review the channels that are working together to achieve your business goals. Second to that, it’s an opportunity to identify where your business could improve performance by using specific metrics and data points.

By working through this process, you can then start to build theories and hypotheses around the insights drawn from the data. Whether results are impacted by a drop in performance, campaigns have stagnated or you are looking for new areas of your digital ecosystem to invest in, follow the below steps to get started.

Review your marketing channels

Using an analytics platform, for example via a customer data platform or Google Analytics, your first step will be to conduct a year over year (YoY) comparison on annual performance of your media channels. The purpose here is to understand whether there are seasonal or macro-economic patterns affecting performance. If results are low across all digital channels, this could indicate an issue with your website, value propositions or consumer trust/confidence. The biggest indicator of performance here will be your key performance indicator (KPI).

Competition

When it comes to competition, often you can lean on digital metrics to evaluate how much and how aggressively your competitors are spending. By jumping into your Google ads account and running some high level keyword research using the Keyword Planner tool, Google will give you estimates on monthly traffic volume for particular keywords and also the average cost per click. A general rule of thumb is, the more expensive the click, the more competitive it is to have your ad show at the top of SERPs. If you also review your campaign data and can see that your CPC has been increasing alongside your cost per conversion/lead, this is usually indicative of higher competition for those particular keywords.

Read more: Learn the basics of PPC Marketing

Traffic, organic and paid

Understanding fluctuations in traffic across organic and paid channels is important. For example, when it comes to SEO, a common KPI for performance is organic traffic. A well-oiled SEO strategy includes all facets of SEO, from keyword-rich content to technical SEO. One thing to look for is if you notice a significant dip and ongoing traffic alongside a drop in your conversion rate, or number the total number of conversions month over month and year over year. This could mean there’s a larger issue at play around how your website is being optimised in accordance to best practices.

Media optimisations

There are a variety of factors that influence the performance of your media campaigns, however, a major factor is how optimised your campaigns are towards your business goals. A few high level optimisations to consider are:

• How you test different landing pages and advertisements (including copy)

• Tracking your daily ad performance and managing it accordingly

• Segmenting and filtering out audiences, based on their performance or engagement with ads

• Re-adjusting your budget or spend towards your best performing campaigns

• Filtering or removing keywords that aren’t generating cost-efficient or quality traffic 

• Pausing or removing ads that aren’t gaining any traction

• Testing different value propositions or calls to actions in your campaigns

By doing the above on a monthly or quarterly basis, you’ll be equipped with a solid understanding of all the digital forces at play when it comes to your digital marketing.

If you’re interested in learning more about Honest Fox’s approach to conducting a digital health check or audit on your ecosystem, speak to us today!