5 Tips to Accurately Measure Marketing Campaign Success (Or Failure)

Measuring the success of marketing, public relations, advertising and social media campaigns is a no brainer. However, it requires significant commitment and dedication before, during and after the campaign.

1.  Establish Measurable Objectives: Push yourself or your department to establish measurable objectives. How much do you want to increase your website traffic by… 25%, 50%?  What specific audience do you want to increase brand awareness with and by how much?  How much media coverage do you want to achieve? Are there any specific publications you are looking to achieve coverage in? The more measurable the objectives are, the easier it is to evaluate the campaign success (or failure).

2.  Documents Benchmarks: In order to determine campaign success (or failure), it is critical to document current benchmarks. For example, conduct a website analysis and document the unique visitors, evaluate the new visitors compared to reoccurring visitors, time on the site, bounce rates, sales conversions, etc.  Do the same for your social media sites, publicity and media relations, advertising landing pages, incoming phone calls, sales leads/conversions, etc.

3.  Establish Metrics:  When identifying your strategies and tactics, ensure each strategy/tactic has a specific metric to help measure the success (or failure).  Depending on your strategies/tactics, metrics may include:

• Establishing/tracking a unique toll free number.
• Establishing/tracking advertising website landing pages or unique URLs.
• Establishing/tracking coupon or PDF downloads.
• Establishing/tracking online sales conversions goals.
• Tracking media clips.
• Tracking social media followers and engagement.
• Documenting website analytics.

Depending on your strategies/tactics, there are a number of different tools to help you track results from media clipping services to website analytics.

4.  Ongoing Tracking: Once the campaign has launched, continue diligently tracking and assessing the results. Determining how often you will document the results will help establish accountability. This will also allow you to adjust the campaign as you move forward.

5.  Final Report: Once the campaign has completed, document and assess the final results. Determine the return on investment and whether the campaign was a good use of marketing dollars.

Remaining diligent with the reporting process during the campaign can pay amazing dividends. Successful campaigns with well-documented results and reports can easily be shared with upper management, and help secure marketing dollars for future campaigns.  Campaigns that didn’t quite meet expectations can be evaluated to help identify why, ensuring the same mistakes are not made a second time.