We recently created a New Year's resolution list full of important marketing to-dos in 2014. But we all know keeping resolutions is hard work: other priorities emerge, we run out of time or we simply lose interest. 
The trick to keeping your 2014 New Year's marketing resolutions isn't rocket science; it's all about tracking your marketing efforts. You need to create a plan, determine ways to measure effectiveness, and then measure it. Today we'd like to look at ways to evaluate elements of some of the New Year's resolutions from our previous post.
The first element concerns the resolution to create compelling content. Google, of course, measures "compelling" content for a living — the results of which appear on Search results. Fortunately, you needn't whip up some space-age algorithm.
You can simply track the following metrics across each of these three content channels:
- Web pages —Time on page, frequency and engagement rate (visits during duration), bounce rate.
- Blog articles —Time spent on blog entry, keyword or referring link clicks, bounce rate.
- Social Media — Shares, number of fans who have seen a post, number of people who clicked within post, click-through rate.
Compiling these metrics isn't that difficult. As we previously noted, the data can be pulled from a basic Google Analytics account and your Facebook Insights page.
The real work comes when you try to extract patterns and trends across the content. What were the common elements of your most/least popular pieces of content? Was it a certain topic? A specific author? Did the content speak to a specific target demographic? Was the content informational, commercial, or both? This analysis will reveal what kind of content resonates most and can influence your content creation moving forward.
Next up, the resolution to go explore mobile advertising. Rolling out mobile ads is one thing, tracking your marketing success is another.
So here are some metrics you can employ:
- Pay per click and cost per impression. These are the basic, rudimentary metrics for gauging an ad's success. (You're most likely using these metrics for traditional Web ads anyway.)
- Reach - The number of unique customers your ad reached.
- Targeting - Mobile ad networks can allow you to target ads based on location, demographics, etc. So it's important to measure, for example, what percentage of reached customers are male versus female, their specific location, etc. Therefore, if you determine that a great deal of engaged customers are men living in the East Bay, that can inform future ad campaigns.
- Engagement - Time spent during visit, actions taken after viewing the ad (e.g. clicking on landing or shopping cart page.)
- Shares - How many times the ad is shared. This is very important because if, over time, a handful of customers share your ads, you can cater to them with ads and promotions. These are your "power users." Embrace them!
- Transactions - Amount of revenue brought in from a mobile ad.
Lastly, optimizing your social media channels. In a former life, we worked in business consulting and became familiar with the "100 Pennies" analogy. You have 100 pennies and have to allocate them based on which activities provide the most value. And the logic applies here. Marketing directors are overworked, understaffed, and struggling to keep up with developments in social media. How can they intelligently allocate their limited amount of "pennies" in the right channels? The answer lies in your ability to measure social media effectiveness across various channels.
Some nifty metrics include:
- Audience growth rate
- Follower growth
- Average engagement rate
- Number of new followers per channel ("acquisition rate")
- Visitor frequency rate (new vs. returning visitors)
- Assisted social conversions - use Google Analytics to follow visitors from social media channels and track their behavior over time
- Bounce rate
One more thing. These metrics apply to social media channels at a "macro" level. You'll want to drill down for more precise metrics within each channel. To that end, we've provided some handy Facebook-specific engagement metrics here.
Looking to take the next step of building these metrics into your daily marketing workflow? Contact us for a free consultation!
