By Aileen Barron, Green Acre Marketing

When running a digital campaign, be that on social media or through display advertising platforms, it is essential to track and analyse the campaign in order to identify your return on investment (ROI).

Digital marketing ROI is the measure of the profit or loss that you generate from your digital marketing campaigns, based on the overall cost of the campaign.

Digital marketing brings a more concrete and reliable method of analysing results and identifying your ROI. With traditional advertising, it is more difficult to track conversions and analyse the success in any great detail.

There are analytical tools for every platform. Your website or landing page should act as the hub for all activity, and ultimately for capturing leads.

Google Analytics is an essential tool for digital marketers to track and analyse campaigns. It allows campaign managers to dig deeper into successes or to identify areas for improvement.

Breaking down Google Analytics

By using Google Analytics, you learn more about your website users and how they navigate around your website. It can also help you identify key areas where you can modify your website in order to improve your user experience.

Google Analytics shows how web pages are performing, and how users consume the content within them. This can highlight areas where users are more engaged and interested, drawing attention to the type of content they would like to see more of on your site.

Key metrics to investigate within your Google Analytics are the volume of traffic coming to your website, where that traffic is originating from, and if that coincides with a campaign you are currently running.

You also want to examine the flow of traffic throughout the site, how long a visitor spends on the various pages, how many pages they visit and at what point they leave your website.

The first item that should jump off the page is your bounce rate, with 41-55% being the industry average. Anything above 60% needs further investigation, where it is likely you will need to make improvements.

One of the main reasons for a high bounce rate from a targeted campaign, is the user not being presented with what they expected, when they clicked through for more information.

Social media insights

While Google Analytics should be your key influencer for making changes to your web or landing pages, if your campaign is also incorporating social media, referencing social media insights can give you a better idea of what is working well on your chosen platforms.

It will allow you to identify what content is failing to drive engagement – before traffic even made it to your website.

According to Scrunch, the average engagement rate on social media is between 1% and 3.5%; however, engagement rates over 3% show that your audience is consistently engaging with your content.

Engagements are classed as the following:

  • Click-throughs;
  • Shares;
  • Likes;
  • Retweets;
  • Comments.

The number of click-throughs is the most valuable insight, as it can give an indication of brand interest which would have ultimately taken your audience to the website or landing page. This is often referred to as your click-through rate (CTR).

For marketing departments who wish to investigate their digital campaigns in greater detail, external help is available.

Digital marketing professionals are equipped with the knowledge to interrogate your analytics and make valuable recommendations.

For assistance with your digital marketing campaigns, contact Green Acre Marketing on: [email protected].