An advertising campaign can achieve a lot of different objectives. Improving brand perception, increasing leads or website traffic, or increasing brand awareness. Evaluating the success of any campaign really means determining how effective it is.
Measuring an ad campaign’s effectiveness can be done a few different ways.
1. Analyzing Website or Social Channel Traffic
Any ad campaign is going to automatically drive either site traffic or social media channel action (sometimes both). You can look at traffic from two different views when determining success.
- The ad campaign was designed to drive more site visitors (or social engagement)
- The ad campaign should result in increased traffic with the site because of another objective (lead capture, content download, promoted blogs).
Measuring the increases in site traffic is a good way to tell how influential an ad campaign is on encouraging new or return visitors to engage with your site (or social channels).
2. Looking at the Before and After Metrics
A good scientist always looks at the before, and the after to determine the value of an experiment’s results. The same is true in marketing. The metrics you choose to measure are determined on the campaign you create. To decide which before/after metrics to evaluate, answer the following questions.
- What am I trying to improve?
- How much am I hypothesizing improvement to be?
Once you know the metric(s) that match the first question, and your forecasted change, then you can look at performance in a before and after picture.
3. Reviewing Lead Quality and Volume
Successfully getting leads is not just a numbers game. It’s about quantity AND quality. With a lead-generation focused campaign, you’re looking at a few specific measurements for success.
- The number (volume) of leads you’ve captured.
- The number of captured leads vs the number of clicks (or impressions if you really want to be hard on yourself)
- The quality of the leads (Do the leads you captured match one or any of the intended customer personas your brand has? Did the leads spend time on key landing pages or take desired actions? If yes, the lead quality is good. If no, then the lead quality is poor. This metric is about determining how likely leads are to turn into customers.)
4. Measuring Against a Specific Goal
Sometimes a campaign has a unique objective in mind. For example, you may wish to grow your TikTok following by 40%. To do this, you develop a campaign of rotating sponsored video posts to show to users who are like your current user base. Maybe you leverage look-a-like targeting. Or perhaps you want to increase website traffic by 25% MOM. In this case, you may be pushing website click or traffic ads, or promoting blogs as sponsored posts.
When a campaign has a singular objective in mind, the success of it is dependent on the metric (or metrics) that match that intended goal. The increased following above equates to number of followers gained in relation to dollars spent. The growth in website traffic above may be measured by the number of site visits per month, as well as the number of new site visitors, and number of pages viewed per session.
5. Evaluating the Campaign Metrics (CTR, Conversions, etc.)
When any digital campaign is set up, it’s likely you’ll be looking at a few common metrics to review performance in real-time. You’ll also use these to make optimizations during the campaign’s lifespan.
Campaign metrics include things like click-through-rate (CTR), engagements, clicks, leads, conversions, cost-per-click and cost-per-conversion. Depending on your campaign’s objective (traffic, lead capture, audience engagement) the metrics you’ll care most about may vary.
Cost per click is the metric that’s always a good indicator of how effective and cost-effective a campaign is. If the CTR is low, you’re likely not serving up the right content or message (or it could be the wrong placement). And if the CTR is high, but the conversion volume is low, the campaign likely needs some work to bridge the gap in behavior.
Some good campaign metrics to evaluate include:
- Low cost-per-click
- High CTR %
- Above average conversion for the channel/medium you’re in
- Low cost-per-conversion or lead
- A good impressions to clicks ratio (and clicks to conversions ratio)
