Marketing Metrics That Help Prove Campaign Success

Your company decided to run a marketing campaign, and now that it's coming to an end, perhaps you're wondering what metrics you should be looking at to decide if your campaign was a success or not.

Let's back up a bit. If your company deided to run a marketing campaign, hopefully it wasn't something that was just thrown together without goals, because goals are an important aspect of defining campaign success or not. You should define what you want to accomplish. Do you want more sales? Do you want to build a large database of contacts? Perhaps you just want to build awareness?

For the metrics we list below, set goals for each of them before your campaign begins so that you can see if your campaign is performing how you had hoped along the way, which in turn, can help determine if your campaign was successful or not.

Website Traffic

If your website traffic from your campaign is low, chances are your campaign probably wasn't successful. Stating the obvious here, but people have to visit your website in order to convert, and with low website traffic, that isn't the case. However, there's more to website traffic. You should be measuring:

• Organic traffic: This is the traffic that came from search engines throughout your campaign. If you got a lot of organic traffic from your campaign, that means you probably were ranking really well in Google for a keyword relevant to your campaign.
• Referral traffic: This is traffic that came to your website via an inbound link from another website. Depending on the tool you use, social traffic may be linked into this category, but with the HubSpot tool, that is not the case. If you see an uptick in your referral traffic from your campaign, that means that your content has value and your audience is sharing it.
• Social traffic: As it was mentioned above, HubSpot looks at social traffic as its own source, but some analytics sites will loop this in with social. If your campaign generates good social traffic, that means that your distribution methods are working properly and that your content is valued highly.
• Paid traffic: This is a measurement that is a part of your traffic, but it's much more important to see if this traffic converts. Paying just for website visitors that don't do anything else on your site doesn't render success.

Traffic is a metric that can help prove campaign success if your campaign's goal is to raise awareness about your brand, but typically high traffic isn't the end goal around a campaign. Sample goals for traffic may be:

• Increase organic traffic by 25%
• Increase overall traffic by 30%
• Increase organic traffic by 25% and referral traffic by 10%

Leads

Leads are important to measure throughout your campaign because they represent someone who willingly gave you their information. The two types of leads you should be tracking are:

• Marketing qualified leads (MQLs): MQL vs. SQL is something that should be determined internally, but a general guideline for an MQL is someone who took an action on your site but still needs some qualifying before being ready for sales.
• Sales qualified leads (SQLs): An SQL is a lead you have determined is qualified and ready to talk to sales.

If leads are the core measurement of success for your campaign, some sample goals may be:

• Increase all leads by 20%
• Increase MQLs by 10%
• Generate 15 SQLs

Conversion Rates

Conversion rates are what tie our last two points together. It is the ratio of how many people converted to how many people visited throughout the course of the campaign. A couple different types of conversion rates to track are:

• Lead conversion rate: This is the ratio of leads to visitors.
• Customer conversion rate: This is the ratio of customers to visitors.

For many campaigns, the end goal is to generate revenue, so a good customer conversion rate is highly valued. A sample goal may be something like: Have a lead conversion rate of 5 percent throughout the campaign.

Social Media

Maybe the goal of your campaign is focused around social media. Some metrics to look at to determine social media success are:

• Followers: Did your campaign generate more followers for your social channels? This helps your brand awareness and gets your content in front of more eyes.
• Engagement: A campaign getting high social engagement means people are interested in what you are sharing. Engagement can be measured as anything from likes to comments.
• Clicks: This is the number of clicks a URL is getting on your social channels. This ties in with the social traffic we highlighted above.
• Contacts: This is how many contacts/leads came to your website originally from social media.

If social media is the focus of your campaign, some sample goals may be:

• Increase Twitter followers by 50
• Generate 100 clicks to our website
• Bring in 10 new contacts from social media

All in all, there are several marketing metrics your company may want to track to render a campaign successful or not, but the metrics highlighted above are a good start. Remember, setting goals is paramount when it comes to defining a campaign's success.

What other marketing metrics does your company use to help prove campaign success?