The old adage is that “I know 50% of my marketing is working, but I don’t know which 50%.” This sentiment doesn’t work in an era where decision makers want to measure the impact of every investment. As a result, many decision makers focus on the cost per conversion, which every experienced marketer will tell you is an incredibly misleading metric. We’ve already written multiple blog posts on how this metric ultimately stifles growth, and a recent article by MarketingWeek reinforces this.

As a member of Access Awarity, we are going to share an insider’s view of ways to measure your marketing and advertising efforts to ensure that you’re maximizing your growth potential.

First, we’ll cover a few ground rules.

1. Embrace the fact that marketing and advertising is an inexact science. Yes, we live in a digital era where we can measure more metrics than ever before, but ultimately, good marketing and advertising makes someone feel something about your brand and business. The goal of any marketing effort is to get someone to change their behavior, and as you know, it’s hard to get people to make changes. Good marketing and advertising get a potential customer to feel something about your brand that makes them consider you the next time they have a need. But we have to embrace the fact that it’s virtually impossible to accurately measure how people feel after seeing your advertisement. Even focus groups and ad testing are shown to have significant limitations when compared to real world impact.
2. The path to purchase is long and winding and we must meet consumers on the journey they take, which isn’t always the path that’s easiest for us. They say a consumer needs to see you an average of 7 times before taking action. While our goal is to get a straight-line path to conversion, we must meet the customer where they are and focus on being present throughout the various steps of the journey. If we only focus on the last 10% of the journey with paid search, we’re going to lose a lot of potential opportunities along the way.
3. It’s all about the funnel. How many people know you and think of you first? How many are engaged with your brand and content? These are the metrics that will ultimately determine how many will eventually convert.
4. It takes time. Changing human behavior isn’t an overnight task.  Identify a plan that makes sense for you financially and stick with it. Don’t make snap judgements. We’ve seen people over-engineer their marketing plans thinking that the more they tinker, the better their results. We recently saw someone walk away from a campaign that was delivering a 92% ROI because they were determined to see how they could make it better!

With that, here are some best practices to measure your marketing.

1. Track all your marketing activities and their results in a spreadsheet. How many new customer prospects is your advertising reaching by each channel (Awarity, Social, Search, Email, etc.)? This is the top of your funnel. Track how many new people you’re reaching every month and store this information by channel. Also track how much you’re spending for each new person you’re reaching.
2. How many total users and new users are visiting your website every month. If you go to your Google Analytics dashboard, and on the left side click Acquisition -> All Traffic -> Channels you can see data on your new website users by channel. Track this monthly and compare to your investments to see how they’re moving the needle. At Awarity, we’ve seen 98.2% of all conversions follow an impression, and not a click. The goal of this isn’t to see your click traffic, but to see how the new people you’re reaching are eventually finding your website to learn more and engage with your brand.
3. Create a pre-sales milestone. It could be to offer a free quote/proposal, obtain a free sample, join your email list for a discount, download a white paper, etc. You may need to experiment with a few options, but this is a great way to pull someone to the next step and reduce friction. Then you can track this metric and see how it correlates to the data in step 1.

‍At Awarity, we are actively developing ways to help you track these items in Awarity Campaign Central to make it easier for you to track your overall marketing performance. We are committed to ensuring you are getting the best value in the world when it comes to your advertising, and you have our commitment that we will continue to invest in new ways to help you grow your business. If you’d ever like to discuss your marketing plans or measurement with us, we are always happy to connect. Thank you for being a fantastic partner and don’t ever hesitate to reach out if we can do something to help you.

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