If you want to evaluate your marketing performance, but don’t know where to start, this article is for you.
Knowing your marketing return on investment (ROI) can help you eliminate unnecessary spending and make the most out of your marketing budget.
In this article, we will share 7 ways you can evaluate the performance of your marketing efforts today.
You cannot evaluate your marketing performance without knowing what your marketing goals are.
Are 2,000 “likes” on your Facebook post enough to justify more social media spending?
Unless you know what kind of engagement you were aiming for in the first place, there’s no way to tell.
Further, different marketing avenues require different goals. Some of your marketing efforts will be geared towards generating traffic while others will focus on conversions.
Before you begin your evaluation, consider your marketing performance goals in the following areas:
Each piece of marketing content you create needs to be linked to one or more of the factors above in order to measure ROI.
The easiest thing to look at when evaluating your marketing performance is your website analytics.
Begin by looking at overall traffic trends. Has your traffic increased or decreased over time?
Look at your daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly analytics. What trends can you spot?
Which days of the week have the most traffic? What times of the day?
How many new visitors come to your website? How many repeat visitors? What are their demographics?
Also, what are some of your most popular pages? What about the least popular?
Asking these, and similar questions will help you identify what’s working well – and what you can improve upon – in terms of your website content.
An inbound link is a link from an external domain that’s pointing towards your domain.
Google uses inbound links to evaluate the quality of your content.
If you have many high-quality sites linking to your domain, your ranking will be higher.
You can also look at inbound links to evaluate the quality of your leads and give more context to your conversion rate statistics.
How are your best customers finding you? And how can you shift some of your marketing spendings to focus on these sources of traffic and leads?
Your website analytics will provide you with some inbound link information.
However, if you have content that you have built outside of your website, such as landing pages, you need to check their analytics as well.
Most social media platforms provide you with basic analytics about your account performance.
However, you may also want to use third-party tools to get better insights into your social media ROI.
In general, it is fairly difficult to measure the exact number of leads and conversions you get from social media marketing.
That’s why you should pay close attention to other factors when measuring your ROI, such as:
PageRank is Google’s way of ranking websites in search engine results.
Pay attention to your overall website page rank but don’t forget to check the rankings of individual posts and pages.
There might be a particular blog post that ranks on Page 1 of Google while your overall page rank is only 4 or 5.
Looking at this metric can give you valuable insights into the types of content that have the highest ROI.
Ask your customers how they found you.
This is especially important if you use any marketing methods that are not easily trackable, such as TV commercials or direct mail.
You can send out a quarterly survey or ask customers how they found you (include a short questionnaire) on your post-purchase “Thank You” page.
Referrals can come in many different forms, including social media shares.
Make sure it is easy for you to track and evaluate your referrals by adding “click to share” buttons, and other ways to connect your company to your online content.
If your sales are going up, you are doing something right!
However, you want to make sure you know exactly why that is happening.
Tracking the other metrics on this list can give you valuable insights into your sales performance.
Once you’ve evaluated your individual marketing performance metrics, it’s time to put them all together and measure the overall ROI of your marketing efforts.
The simplest formula for calculating ROI is this:
(Return – Investment) / Investment
However, measuring ROI is rarely as easy as that.
There are many different marketing channels and confounding variables to consider – which is why bringing in a team of marketing professionals might help.
Here at Handmade SEO, we do all the hard work of measuring and evaluating your marketing performance for you.
Our Monthly Measuring Report gives you an in-depth look at how your marketing efforts are really doing to help you eliminate unnecessary spending and make the most out of your marketing budget.
Want to see how we can work together?