Given the investment and effort marketers put into their organisation’s campaigns, it’s no wonder that how you measure campaign outcomes is a key consideration.
Of course online campaigns such as AdWords come with detailed analytics, but they only really show one action taken from the ad (eg a click, call or other set goal). They don’t present a deeper picture of the campaign responder’s journey beyond that.
It can therefore be challenging for marketers to truly evaluate the effectiveness of their campaigns, particularly when ads point to general website pages (such as the home page) or phone numbers (the main sales number) that are publicised in a host of other communications.
Clarity of what you want to achieve
To help, it’s important to define clear objectives for what you want that journey to result in. For example, do you want the responder to…
- Find out more about a particular product/service
- Download a guide, whitepaper or sign up to an e-communication
- Call one of your sales team
- Sign up to an event
- Take up a special offer etc
Understand the journey
The next step is to pinpoint what journey led to what customer interaction. There may be a variety of different channels you’re using to encourage people to come to your site and complete the call to action you’ve defined in your objectives.
Beyond measuring the volume of traffic different campaigns brought to your site/page, also consider:
- Does one journey bring a higher bounce rate to your website or webpage – if so, do you need to change the messaging during the journey and on the page?
- How long are people staying on the page when they come via each journey? Can you tweak and adapt the page to build greater engagement?
- What do they then go on to do? – For example, leave the site completely, change the product option on the page, select different product colours or features, go on to other pages – if so, which?
Assessing activity such as these alongside your different customer journeys and the channels you use in them, will help you to segment different customer behaviour and interests. In doing so, you can identify areas where you need to help the responder further to achieve your overall objectives, for example serving up additional information, simplifying a process in the journey, changing a choice of channel, or adding more interactive features like video.
Summary
Who doesn’t want to know the true value of their marketing campaign outcomes? It’s been a conundrum which has plagued marketers and business owners for decades. The beauty of technology though is that we can track responder activity more easily now. The key is to be very clear what your campaign’s objectives are and set in place focused elements that help the responder progress easily through the process.
And wherever possible look beyond the general click-through totals and generic visitor traffic stats to see the true buyer journeys at play within your campaigns. This clarity will help you better understand the effect of different channels and campaigns, and as a result enable you to help more customers make that call to action you want.
At Fusion Analytics we’ve been helping organisations wise up to the true effect their online and offline campaigns are generating. Our WebFusion analytics software is bringing valuable insights to aid marketing campaign measurement.