How to measure the success of a marketing campaign?

Marketing campaigns are the lifeblood of businesses, as they help organisations reach their target audience, drive brand awareness and, ultimately, sales and revenue.

At the same time, measuring the success of a marketing campaign is crucial to determine the ROI and make data-driven decisions for future campaigns. However, the metrics and KPIs used for evaluation will vary depending on the campaign goals and objectives.

While this is a complicated scenario, we spoke to Rahil Mohammad, Founder & Creative Head of the advertising agency, ‘Where Is The Brief’. Rahil is an advertising and marketing professional with over 11+ years of industry experience. He has worked with over 100+ brands in his career, including Colgate, Hershey’s, Ola Electric and Burger King, to name a few, and also as a core member of the marketing teams at Ola, Unacademy and Paytm Insider.

Here is what he has to say about how consumer businesses can measure the success of their marketing campaigns.

Setting clear goals

Before launching your marketing campaigns, it is essential to define your goals. What do you want to achieve through your marketing campaign? Do you want to generate leads, introduce a new product, improve brand awareness, increase sales, or do something else? 

Defining your goals will help you determine which metrics to track to measure your marketing campaign's success.

Here is the broad breakdown of the metrics into different categories.

A. Social

Social is the fastest way to gauge response traction and measure every single action of the audience.Social Media would primarily entail the overall reach. Basically, how many people have seen your content/ad? 

Impressions are another metric that one should look at. Impressions refer to the total count of how many times your ad or content has appeared on the users' screen. Impressions are a valuable metric for tracking your marketing campaign's reach and estimating how many people have been exposed to your content.

It is important to note that impressions do not necessarily mean that your content has been engaged with or has achieved its intended goals.Engagement rates measure the level of interaction between customers and your brand. Businesses can track engagement rates on social media platforms by monitoring likes, shares, saves and comments. High engagement rates indicate that your marketing campaign resonates with your target audience. 

But note that while high engagement rates indicate that your campaign resonates with the audience, i.e., primarily the content is working, it's essential to understand how this engagement translates into tangible outcomes for the business. 

For example, if increased sales are the desired outcome of the marketing campaign, then how many folks are actually reaching the website to check the product out after engaging with the content becomes essential Analysing the correlation between engagement metrics and key business objectives provides marketers with actionable insights into optimising their campaigns for better results.

Sustained growth in followers over a sudden increase in follower numbers is something that one should look for.

B. Search numbers

With more and more online first / D2C brands springing up, search numbers have become a really important first-order metric.The average customer OR, say, the user behaviour is to first search for the product/brand name. This can happen either on Google or a dedicated search bar of a marketplace.If there is an increase in the number of Google searches and on marketplaces (e-commerce and quick commerce platforms) after running the campaign - then this becomes a clear barometer reading to gauge the interest levels of the TG.

Conversely, if there is no spike in searches, it results in helping one analyse the situation as to what was lacking in the campaign.A search can happen not only because one has interacted with the brand on a brand channel - rather it can happen through any medium. For example, Word Of Mouth [your neighbour talks about a brand, and the first thing you do is search for it], PR article, you listen to it in a podcast - the list is endless.

Good marketing campaigns increase the pull for the brand, which means that people will go to shops and online marketplaces to ask for or look for the brand. This increase in search volume or demand is an indication of the success of the campaign.

C. App and website

Businesses can track website visits/app downloads before and after the campaign to determine how many people are interested in your product or service and are drawn to your website after seeing your campaign. 

Conversion from a performance ad to your landing page is an important metric. This is how many people click on your ad - Click Through Rate.

Once people are on the landing page [either on the app or the website] - One should look for a couple of metrics.- Time spent on the page- Total time spent on the website/pages navigated- Successful add to cart- Add to cart but no purchase- Successful purchaseYou can also follow the time spent on your website and bounce rates to see if visitors engage with your content or leave your website immediately.

But beyond just tracking the number of visitors, it's crucial to delve into the quality of that traffic. 

Are these visitors relevant to your target audience? Are they engaging with your content? By analysing the source of traffic, bounce rates, and time spent on the website, marketers can gain insights into the effectiveness of their marketing efforts in attracting and retaining valuable visitors.Another metric businesses use to measure the success of their campaigns is the repeat rate, which is a strong indicator and talks directly about a successful trial of the product - the customer is happy and is back for another purchase. 

D. Brand awareness

Brand awareness is a metric that measures the level of recognition of your brand amongst your target audience. 

Talking to a specific set of people, group discussions, impromptu one-on-one interrogations, questionnaires, blind tests and more.It is all about testing how many people:

- Have heard of your brand- Know what it deals in / sells / offers- Follow you / interact with you at any touchpoint- First impressions- Customers can enlighten about what they like/dislikeThere is a lot that one can dig out about the brand. 

If done after a campaign, one has to measure keeping the numbers before the campaign as the benchmark to evaluate the efficacy of the campaign.

Sentiment analysis

Sentiment analysis is also a very critical metric that needs great attention.

What are people saying? What do your customers feel? First opinions? First reviews? First reactions?

Listening on the go across the digital landscape helps understand the audience's pulse and allows for room to build and manoeuvre on the go.On a sentiment analysis based on keywords - one can map and conclude if a particular campaign/activity resulted in positive, negative or neutral.

E. Earned and shared media 

Earned media basically refers to the coverage of your brand/campaign by media houses via articles, lists, PR releases, etc. 

Businesses can measure earned media by tracking the number of mentions or articles written for their brand / about the campaign or product and monitoring press coverage. 

While shared media is the collective total of reach and impressions generated by ‘Earned and Owned Media’.

F. Inbound communications 

For any brand with a community/a set of customers/or a set of interested people mapped, inbound communication during any marketing campaign becomes a critical tool to drive home the objective.- Emailers: Open rates and clickthrough rates on emails can be tracked.- Whatsapp: Link clicks, and messages seen can be tracked on Whatsapp.

Push notifications: Clickthrough rates on push notifications can be tracked.All these metrics showcase how effective the communication/content and the offering are simultaneously for someone to be interested in diving in.

G. Business-centric & overall analysis

There are a series of metrics that broadly help evaluate the overall efficacy of a marketing campaign.Total qualified leads: How many have we brought in inside our funnel?Total real customer: What is the number of people who have bought the product/service?Also, how many landed on the page vs how many converted [ Ratio ]Cost per lead: Total spend that has happened to generate a lead.

H. Return on Advertising Spends (RoAS)

ROAS is a crucial metric to measure the success of any marketing campaign. 

How much are you spending, and what is the return on that expense?Sum total of all the spends needs to be considered across different touch points - e.g. performance ads, influencer spends, paid PR, etc.Each vertical can separately be analysed for its outcome.

Pre and post-campaign metrics/analysis

Before launching a marketing campaign, it is vital to establish a baseline for the metrics you want to measure. This is called the pre-dipstick analysis. This analysis will help you understand the existing consumer behaviour, brand awareness, and sales figures before the campaign.

After the campaign, it is necessary to conduct a post-dipstick analysis to measure the campaign's impact. This analysis will help you understand the changes in consumer behaviour, brand awareness, and sales figures after the campaign. The delta between pre and post-dipstick analysis will help you measure your marketing campaign's effectiveness and identify improvement areas.

There are a lot of metrics. And it gets tricky when one gets started on the tracking and measurement. It is crucial to pick the right metrics and have a differential weightage for each metric depending on the campaign's objective.Data is important. But what one takes out of it is far more important.Get into the more minor details, where most hidden gems are.Knowing your audience better solves everything you wish to create and achieve in the future.Marketing is a mix of fixed and fluid strategies.You plan a strategy and begin basis the objective of the campaign.As one proceeds, continuous monitoring and listening will aid in rehashing some parts of the strategy if needed. This is critical.This basically brings us to the point that - metrics are not a dessert that one looks for only at the end of the meal/marketing campaign.Rather, it is part of the entire course of the meal.

Happy Metric-ing!