It’s the age old question…how do I know if my digital marketing is working?
The answer is, there is no single answer. The way you know your digital marketing is working highly depends on the products and services you opt to engage for marketing purposes. It also depends on your business type and industry. For example, a clothing store will have a very different view of success to a non-for-profit.
Instead, you’re best to break this question into types of digital marketing and evaluate them all separately.If you don’t know where to start, you can find some of the top ways to track the success of your SEO, social media marketing and more below.
Photo by Lukas Blazek on Unsplash
How to Tell If Your Digital Marketing is Working
3 Ways to Tell if Your SEO is Working
1. An increase in website traffic.
An increase in traffic to your website traffic is a sure-fire way to tell your SEO is working. This website metric is especially important if you’ve recently updated, or made a change to your SEO strategy, including publishing new content.
You can check your website traffic through Google Analytics, or, a live reporting dashboard if your digital provider offers the service. You can also drill down where the traffic is coming from, so organic search results, social media, paid ads and more. This will help you know what in particular is working at driving traffic.
2. Conversion rate growth.
There is no doubt every business owner loves seeing their conversion rate increase, but did you know it can be a sign of effective SEO? One of the main goals of SEO, or any digital marketing for that matter, is to see an increase in sales or bookings, so if your sales are increasing, your SEO is functioning correctly.
Again, this is something you will be able to track in Google Analytics if you have form and button conversion tracking turned on. You’ll be able to trace where the users who converted came from, whether it be organic search results, a paid ad or social media, amongst other things.
3. Decreased bounce rate.
What is a bounce rate? A bounce rate is exactly what it sounds like — people clicking on your website and bouncing right back out because it’s either not working or not what they were expecting to find. Naturally, as a business owner, you want people to stay on your website and eventually convert to a customer — so keeping your bounce rate low is important.
Many digital marketing services promise their SEO can get your website to rank higher, which is brilliant, but only if it’s in relevant search results. Ranking highly, but in non-relevant results is directly linked to higher bounce rates, as when a searcher clicks on your website it likely will not be relevant to them, causing them to leave your website.
If you see your bounce rate decreasing overtime, your SEO is working as planned.
3 Signs Your SEM is Working
1. Lowered cost per acquisition.
Cost per acquisition (or CPA) is the price a business pays per every new customer acquired through the campaign. Your CPA can be lowered by improving your ad quality, which can include tweaks to copy, changing the linked landing pages and more. Ideally, a highly performing Google Ads campaign will have a downward trending CPA.
2. Increase in total clicks and click-through rates.
Clicks are the most common and easiest way to track your campaign success in the early days. They can tell your account manager when to pause ads not performing well and increase bids on those that are. However, the success of the overall campaign shouldn’t be determined by clicks alone.
Similarly to clicks, the click through rate (or CTR) on a campaign is an important metric to follow monthly. The CTR is simply the percentage of impressions which resulted in ad clicks (total clicks divided by total impressions).
Many businesses get caught up in trying to achieve the perfect CTR, but it simply doesn’t exist. Depending on the industry, the target CTR can differ greatly. For example, the average CTR for dating services is 6.05% compared to 2.09% for hospitality. Instead, focus on improving your businesses average CTR month-on-month.
3. A high quality score.
Quality score is the most talked about Google Ads metric; but what exactly is it? Quality score is a metric created by Google to measure the relevancy of your content using other performance metrics such as CTR and landing page quality.
The higher your Google Ad quality score the better. In fact, those with a quality score of between 7 to 10 will likely pay less to advertise. Naturally those with a lower score will pay more.
3 Ways to Tell Your Social Media Marketing is Working
1. High conversion metrics.
Conversions refer to actions taken on your Facebook, Instagram or Messenger Ads. They can be anything from a phone call or direct message to a website visit or product purchase. When analysing your conversion metrics, the higher the better. The higher your conversion metric, the more actions are being taken on your business.
A successful social media marketing campaign will have steadily increasing or constant conversion rates month-on-month. Although conversion are not the only important goal, sometimes brand awareness may be the primary goal of the Ad campaign.
2. Your click-through rate and cost-per click stay constant.
If your click-through rate (CTR) runs high and cost-per-click (CPC) runs low with both only displaying minimal fluctuations, your ad is likely performing well. If not, your ad may be experiencing ad fatigue. It is important to note most new ads need to run for a minimum of three months to establish a solid base and accurate performance metrics — so don’t give up on your ads too soon.
Ad fatigue is when a Facebook ad has been circulating for a while and your target audience has seen it too many times. When this happens you’ll likely see a drastic increase in CPC and a decrease in CTR.
If you do suspect your Facebook ad is suffering from ad fatigue, try some of our tips below.
How to fix ad fatigue:
- Decrease the ad time frame for future ads. Run them for no more than one month at a time.
- Create an ad rotation with three to four ads. When one begins experiencing fatigue, pause the campaign for a few weeks and relaunch another in your rotation.
- Change your ad content. Changing up your ad content, especially visuals such as video and images, is an easy way to refresh your Facebook Ads.
3. Track your social media referrals.
We all know how important tracking website traffic is; but did you know you can track where your visitors are coming from? While Facebook does tell you the number of click-throughs to your website, what it doesn’t measure is when someone clicks then closes the browser before the page has a chance to load. For a more accurate representation of your social media website referrals take a look at Google Analytics.
Best practice is to compare your Google Analytics social media referrals to Facebook Ads Mangers website clicks data. If there is a great discrepancy between the two, you may need to take a look at your ad strategy.
4. Calculate your return on investment.
Determining your return on investment (or ROI) on social media ads is a simple process. In fact, most social media platforms display your campaign ROI throughout its runtime.
To add your ROI metric to your Ads Manager Dashboard;
- Click into the Performance drop-down menu, then select Customise Columns. The reporting creation window should appear.
- On the left-hand side of the page, select Standard Event.
- Under Metrics to Include, select total Purchase ROAS (return on ad investment) and Purchase. Your ROI will now be visible in your ad manager dashboard.
When looking at your ROI, your goal should be a positive percentage, meaning you’re making more money than you’re spending.
What to do if your Facebook Ad has a negative ROI?
If your Facebook ad has a negative ROI, your campaign is running at a loss. It’s time to pay it some attention.
- Consider editing the creative, including copy, images and video — you’ll be surprised the change it can make.
- Reevaluate your target audience, has your target audience changed at all?
- Change your campaign objective.
2 Ways to Tell your Website is Working for Your Business
1. Lower or lowering bounce rates.
Bounce rates are a key indicator of website performance, but unlike other metrics, you want to keep your bounce rate as low as possible. High bounce rates can indicate there is something wrong with your website, such as broken links or images, responsiveness errors and more. Fixing these issues can help lower your bounce rate.
If you’ve fixed all the backend issues and are still seeing a high bounce rate, it may be an issue with your content. Check the pages with the highest bounce rate for the following:
- Outdated or incorrect information.
- Unoptimised heading structures.
- Broken links.
- Grammar and spelling errors.
- Placement in relevant search results.
How can you check your website bounce rate?
You can check the bounce rate for each page on your website through a performance dashboard, or if you don’t have access to one, Google Analytics is a great place to start.
2. You’re getting leads from your website.
The easiest way to track the success of your website is through lead volume. Whether they fill out a form, contact your business directly via email or phone or purchase a product they’re all signs your website is working for your business.
If you do see a sudden drop off in your leads, it may be time to audit your website.
Get in touch with one of our digital marketing specialists for a free consultation around your digital marketing.