The best ways to track Return on Investment from your marketing activities

Proving the Return On Investment (ROI) of digital marketing is one of the biggest challenges faced by marketers today. In fact, a recent research report suggests that ~47% of marketers find it difficult to attribute leads to revenue and ~42% don’t know the right metrics to measure performance. Here at Expression Marketing, we love numbers! And that is because they draw the hard line between what we deem successful or not. This article looks at the basic meaning of ROI and how businesses can track their initiatives in an easy-to-understand manner.

When you launch a marketing campaign it is important to know what your end goals are. These are the most important factor to agree on because they ultimately set out your marketing intentions and will guide what metric you will need to be keeping a close eye on during day-to-day and campaign periods.

Hub Spot tells us, “At the most basic level, ROI compares the amount of money you spend on a project with the amount of revenue you gain from it.” “For most businesses, one good way to set a "good ROI" benchmark for each marketing strategy is to look at the return from similar tactics you've tried in the past, as well as your current sales numbers. That information should help you create ROI benchmarks and goals that are realistic for your company.”

Digital marketing is fantastic for tracking results as you have access to a multitude of different metrics that you can drill down into. It is easy to get caught up on what metrics are important in terms of bigger picture growth and benefit to your business. So, we’ve plucked out a few key measurements we think are important to know, no matter the size or type of business you have:

Visitors

· # of Total Visitors

· # of New Visitors

· # of Returning Visitors

The metrics above outline how many people are seeing your content! Growth in any form is what you are looking for here, especially during campaign periods. The metric is also useful in identifying purchasing behaviours and seasonality trends amongst your audience.

Content

· Top Landing Pages

· Top Exit Pages

· Top Content

Content metrics allow you to determine what your audience enjoys seeing about your brand and what drove them there initially (i.e., via search terms that took them to a specific landing page). Exit pages also may provide an idea on what content turns your prospective customers way and can indicate a misalignment with your content.

Referral

· Traffic Sources

This indicates where your customers visiting and where you might like to be considering running paid campaigns or investing your time to. i.e. news sites, social media, local business directory etc.

Leads

· # of Leads

· % of Visitors that Turned Into Leads

· % of Leads that Turned Into Business (Conversion Rate)

· Ongoing Return on Investment (Revenue – Cost)

Lead metrics are probably the most important set of metrics in determining how far your campaign dollars are taking you in terms of return value. If you can determine that your visitors are all turning into leads when visiting X page on your website, you can pat yourself on the back knowing that the content on that page was enough to spark some interest from your prospective customers.

If you want to calculate ROI specifically based on what your spending is, check out the great calculator from Hub Spot here.

It’s also important to note that social media campaigns often have other metrics which are as important and interesting to the metric mentioned above. Stay tuned for another article on social media metrics to come!