3 MIN. READ

Before you can determine if your advertising campaign is a success, you need a strategic, achievable goal. It provides a guideline for the metrics you’ll use to measure the success of one or more campaigns.

Simply put, you can't measure success without goals!

You can pour all of your department's time, effort and creativity into producing the greatest advertising campaign in the history of your organization, and its launch might still be met with hesitation and nervous expectation from your leadership team. Advertising is an investment. Unless you can show a return on that investment, your budget is going to shrink, making it even harder for you to build your brand and increase market share.

Your ability to prove the success of your advertising campaigns is just as important as the content of the campaigns themselves. Here are five keys to measuring advertising success:

Analyzing Website Traffic

Tracking new visitors to your website is one of the easiest ways to measure the success of an advertising campaign. While checking for a general increase in traffic after launching an ad campaign is helpful, it is always more effective if you can identify new visitors while showing that they arrived as a result of your ad.

This can be achieved by tracking links in digital ads or by tracking the use of ad exclusive codes from radio or TV ads. You also have an opportunity to gather important information about the success of your ads when new users create accounts on your website.

Tracking New Leads

This is where your marketing team can really show the efficiency of your campaigns. In the digital marketing world, this is commonly done by assessing click-through rates (CTR) and conversion rates (CR). CTR tells you exactly how many people are clicking the call to action in your ad out of the total number of people that viewed it. You can follow CTRs through your sales funnel from a social media ad, to a white paper download, to account creation; this provides valuable information about the quality of new leads.

A CR is more specific than a CTR; it measures how many people are performing a distinct action outlined in the goal of the ad campaign. This could be signing up for a newsletter, filling out a form, creating an account, among others. If you are in an industry with a long sales cycle, conversion rates can show immediate ad success as the person works their way through the funnel toward an eventual sale.

Utilizing Landing Pages

Landing pages are the vehicle that enables you to gather important metrics like CTR and CR. These are pages that visitors reach after clicking an ad or email, or before downloading a white paper or case study. They allow marketing teams to track where visitors come from while gathering important information to help you nurture your lead and move them through the sales funnel. If a landing page gets a visitor to enter their name, email, and company before downloading a case study, you now have the ability to follow up on your new lead with a personalized marketing campaign.

Revenue per Channel

If all of your ads, emails, links, and landing pages have been set up correctly, you can follow your new leads all the way to their logical conclusion – sales. Careful preparation can allow you to see how much revenue comes directly from each channel. This removes the mystery from marketing, showing which campaigns give you the most bang for your buck. If you want to expand your email marketing or social media campaigns, you now have the tools to show the individual ROI of each program. There are still long-term brand awareness benefits that do not immediately result in ROI, but revenue sure makes a compelling case for where to allocate your budget.

External Tools

Finally, if all these seem overwhelming, there are plenty of external tools that enhance your ability to measure the success of your advertising. Google analytics is a great place to start; it provides insight into your ad performance and has reporting tools to help you easily pull important metrics.

There are also organizations that specialize in helping businesses create and measure effective advertising campaigns. Viamedia is a leader in cross-media marketing and engaging target audiences. Contact us for more information about designing an advertising strategy that allows you to measure success easily.