Informative

How to Evaluate The Success of Your Campaigns in 3 Steps

Measuring will always be part of the advertising process, no matter your chosen goal. Without proper measurement, your campaign might end up following a plan that is not optimal; particularly, at this moment of the year where we tend to focus on renewing strategies.

Millie D'Arcangelo

Copy Writer at The Next Ad

Jan 21. 2020

Accurate measurement, therefore, is crucial for your campaign if you’re striving for optimising your resources. If you don’t know the ways to do it, don’t worry; we’ll show you the best ways to evaluate how successful your campaign is or has been. Numbers will be in front of your screen in just a few steps!

1. Determine a goal and the correct KPIs

The path to evaluating your success is born from your goals as a marketer. The question that you should ask yourself in this particular step is:

What do I want to measure?

Your campaign is now either running or finished. When it had just begun, you decided on a goal for your campaigns based on the following:  

• Grow brand awareness (upper-funnel)
• Drive consideration and engagement (mid-funnel)
• Generate leads and conversions (bottom-funnel)

However, this isn’t about campaign goals. You already know what you wish to achieve, so what needs to be done now is to search for the right Key Performance Indicator (KPI) to measure the results. KPIs are metrics that will reflect your initial goal.

Without KPIs, no numbers will show up. 

Visibility and Engagement

So, for example, if you decided on Visibility and Engagement, you can take many approaches. Convenient KPIs for this goal could be:

•  Overall Website Traffic: this will show you how many users access your website.
• Impressions: this will indicate how many people have seen your advert. A low number will note that it is not reaching enough people, and a high number will show your paid ad is on the path of achieving your goal.
• Click-Through-Rate and Click Rate: both show the number of people who decided to click on your ad to learn more, which might later lead to conversions.
  The difference between the two is that the latter is represented in a percentage form. Therefore, CTR will reveal how many people have seen your ad in comparison to the number of people who have clicked on it.

Conversions

Yet, if you decided on Conversions (specifically, purchase), you should proceed in a different direction: 

• Cost per Conversion: this rate shows how much your company has spent on the launched campaign compared to the number of people who have converted. If it’s high, it means your campaign has a high Return on Investment (ROI), which will be explained below.
• Cost per Click: it will tell you how much every click on your ad costs (the more purchases your website receives due to your ads, the lower the price).

Average Position: if you’re running a Google campaign, it is indeed necessary to be aware of how your website is performing on Search Engines. How effective your Google campaign strategy (and the chosen keywords) is will be determined by a favourable position; that is, are users clicking on your ads? We’ll see how to measure this a bit further in this blog.

Others

For all the goals available, it’s good to consider the Overall ROI. ROI stands for Return on Investment which, in other words, means how profitable your campaign is or has been. High revenue is needed consistently through time so that your campaign keeps going in the long term.

Social Media is another approach that would involve other KPIs, such as impressions, retweets, likes, shares, and others of the like. It all depends on the direction your campaign has taken and, naturally, your business model.

Anyhow, goals and the KPI selection are somewhat personal. These are examples that show how one can pick what to measure. Still, if you’re striving for something else, that doesn’t necessarily mean your selection is wrong.

2. Determine a strategy

Now that you’ve selected your KPIs, the next step is to define how you’ll approach it; that is, the strategy you’ll adopt for your evaluation.

So, the question is:

How will I measure my results?

To find the answer, you can ask yourself questions as the two explained below.

Will I analyse every channel separately or all together? 

This question includes:

• Will I focus on Facebook and Instagram only? Will I also add Google?
• Will I count the result as one number, or will I divide it into categories?

If you’re running a cross-channel campaign (which is the most advisable approach to take), it’d be good to compare with other channels and find similar trends and differences. When choosing to target all channels, you’ll get the opportunity to evaluate which one performs best and, likewise, which one isn’t working or seems that won’t work in the long term. Cross-channel advertising will always broaden your horizons, as it’ll provide you with more opportunities (and more people) to be able to reach your goals.

On which period will I focus?

 An event that has recently finished is the Holiday Season. As we all know, these months are unique and can’t be analysed together with your ‘ordinary’ campaigns, for it’ll provide you with inconsistent results. By the same token, if you’re analysing your current performance, then you need to know that these results might or even will change until the end date of your campaign.

To strive for precision in numbers, you must define this very well. Adopting a proper strategy will lead to unambiguous results and will, therefore, make your business plan far more effective.

3. Analyse!

When having so many numbers and results, the final analysis can become quite overwhelming. That’s why we recommend using a third-party platform to evaluate your results more effectively, and most of all, to avoid confusion.

The Next Ad offers the possibility to measure your results by using TNA Analytics. During evaluation (whether your campaign is running or has finished), TNA Analytics will show you an appealing, bespoke display of the overall statistics with the help of customisable templates. The tool is seamlessly connected to Google, so, apart from Facebook and Instagram, your SEO campaign results will be shown. To know more, we’ve got a blog post that explains everything you need to know about The Next Ad Analytics. 

Simultaneously, being aware of the advantages of evaluation is also part of the process. To know about how advanced analytics will benefit your business, you can read this article.

Final thoughts

We’ve seen that to achieve the best results in your campaigns, adopting the correct KPIs for your goal and an effective and coherent strategy will take you towards the desired outcome. Furthermore, to have a clear understanding of your results, The Next Ad Analytics could be of great help. 

Evaluation is always part of the advertising process because it’s not just knowing how your campaign is performing or has performed. In fact, evaluating success will indicate how you’ll proceed for the remainder of your campaign, or if you’ve analysed a finished one, how you’ll do it next time. The Holiday Season, for example, is a period that gives you tons of learnings; yet, the only way to know about them is to evaluate. 

Only after being aware of the performance of your campaigns will you be able to correct, improve, or amplify your marketing strategy.