HubSpot InBound Certified

Monday 19 December 2016

Measuring the Effectiveness of Paid Digital Campaigns

How do you measure the effectiveness of a digital campaign? Is it sufficient to evaluate campaign performance on the basis of campaign metrics alone?

We often boast about no. of impressions served & video views garnered but when it comes to measuring the effectiveness of any digital campaign, digital marketers need to don sales hat. Why? Because every impression cost advertisers a good amount of money and it is unfair as well as illogical if we fail to report the return on ad spend (ROAS).

A successful digital campaign not only depends on efficient targeting and optimization but also on good quality content, conversion friendly page and efficient tracking. Hence, it's important that an end of the campaign report contains both digital campaign metrics as well as content performance metrics (such as avg. time on page & bounce rate). In order to evaluate campaign performance, it's absolutely critical that marketing and sales tools talk with each other.  There are plethora of campaign metrics available for advertisers to report but according to me two key metrics that really matter are sales & impressions per sales (or impressions per profit) & this is applicable for awareness and lead generation type campaigns. 

While many may contest that a brand awareness campaign should not have sales as a metric but just pause on that thought and think - Would you not like to know how many ad impressions resulted in $1 profit in my business? An awareness driven or engagement driven campaign ultimately impact the bottom line of your company.

I prepared a sample template that can be used to measure effectiveness of any paid digital campaign:

Paid-Campaign-Analysis-Template
Paid-Campaign-Analysis-Template
Please note that i have knowingly not added various optimization related metrics such as cost per click, cpm, cost per lead etc., simply because we need to track them on a daily basis - this above template is more ideal for an end of the campaign reporting (however, you can still calculate these metrics using this template). Also, if you know the Profit margins of sales achieved through this campaign i would urge you to also report Impressions per profit figure for your respective products.

Feel free to add / tweak this template as per your business needs. I would love to get your feedback in the comments section.