The ability to measure and analyze your performance indicators is a key step in the success of your promotional campaigns. Measurement tools help isolate weaknesses of your site or your communications and make them more effective.
Find out in this post how to track your performance on the web and reach your goals.
What we mean by web performance?
The performance measure is specific to each department of a company. It can be technical, vis-à-vis your website design quality (load time and performance of your website). It can be relational, vis-à-vis the quality of community management and after-sales service. Here, we will target the performance of web marketing campaigns, that is to say the set of actions and tools used to promote your website and to support sales.
Find out in this post how to track your performance on the web and reach your goals.
What we mean by web performance?
The performance measure is specific to each department of a company. It can be technical, vis-à-vis your website design quality (load time and performance of your website). It can be relational, vis-à-vis the quality of community management and after-sales service. Here, we will target the performance of web marketing campaigns, that is to say the set of actions and tools used to promote your website and to support sales.
1. Implement a web analytics solution
Objective: To obtain the raw data
The measurement of a campaign web performance begins with the availability of data on your site. These data materialize in metric. It is precisely the functionality of a web analytics solution, or to capture the flow of activities on your website (the behavior of your visitors) to represent a real-time image or for a defined period of the behavior of your site web.
Google Analytics can be your starting solution, it is the most famous free analysis tool on the market. The data is recorded by the integration of a tracking code on all pages of your site. You then have access to hundreds of metrics to explore your data in detail, including:
Traffic sources (eg. 2000 visits from sponsored links)
Attendance statistics (eg. 10000 visits during the month of January)
Conversions (Ex. 150 sales since the beginning of the year)
The real-time data (visitors on your website)
From this point it is possible to organize these metrics and handle them properly to get a true representation of the behavior of your campaigns. However, having too many metrics can blur your vision. It is therefore necessary to set goals for the campaign and clarify the data to follow.
2. Set goals
Objective: Determining the framework of the campaign.
It is certain that as a marketing manager, your overall goal of the year will improve sales or visibility of your business. However, these goals alone can summarize the success of your campaign. They are too wide or unsuited to the criteria of a loyalty campaign or "nurturing". It is then necessary to set SMART goals, more accurate and easier to set up an effective monitoring process representing the key variables of your campaigns.
Remember, a SMART goal meets 5 criteria: it must be both Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-.
Let's review these 5 characteristics through an example:
The SMART goal: As part of an online contest operational for 3 weeks, we want to increase the number of subscribers to our newsletter by 1000.
Marketing initiatives undertaken: The competition is accessible from a landing page, the form will include a consent box for registration to the Newsletter. The competition will be supported by a particular sponsored link campaign to support participation.
The objective meets the five criteria:
Specific: Increased number of subscribers in to the newsletter by more than 1,000 people.
Measurable: The evolution of the number of subscribers before the contest and post-contest.
Achievable: The resources available are used to achieve this.
Realistic: The goal has been accomplished by other competitors of equivalent size.
Time: To be achieved within 3 weeks.
After defining the objectives, then it is high time to identify performance indicators to be used to evaluate the effectiveness of your campaign.
3. Establish its indicators
Objective: To help with the decision
Key performance indicators (KPIs) are used to measure the achievement of strategic objectives and performance of specific tactics in place to achieve them. KPIs are built around one or more metrics and other relevant variables (eg. Time) and should help you make a decision. Otherwise, it would mean that the indicator used is not suitable to your campaign. For example, one can find 15 performance indicators to follow your blog.
Indicators are first class allies to assist you in tracking your tactics. Objectively, it is preferable to use a handful of indicators representing the different levels of your campaign funnel. And I advise you to set them according to your funnel: Acquisition - Commitment - Conversion. So be sure to invite your immediate superiors in your working session to identify performance indicators they need to make decisions and to assess the profitability of their web investment.
Using the example of the contest and consider that sponsored links per campaign will support this goal.
Indicators to monitor in "Acquisition":
Click rate (for each PPC campaign).
The cost per click (PPC for each campaign).
Indicators to monitor in "Commitment":
The evolution of weekly visits from Quebec and from under the campaign locations.
The new sessions rates (to assess the quality of traffic: New or Recurrent)
Bounce rate on the form (the landing page assessment) by geographic region
Indicators to monitor in "Conversion"
The form's completion rate (evaluation form).
Now that the objectives and performance indicators are defined, it is then necessary to set up a personalized support structure of your campaigns.
This is effectively monitor the behavior of each tactical implementation, focusing closely visits that will be generated.
4. Structuring personalized campaigns
Objective: To optimize the relevance of performance indicators.
Is your initiatives that achieve actual results or an effect out of your control?
To answer this, it is necessary to be able to trace the flow of information from the origin of the visits. A tool like Google Analytics allows it to monitor traffic sources. By entering additional parameters to your URLs, the tools can then access additional data to isolate each of your marketing initiatives (ie using a different location), to distinguish each link that point to your site. These data should allow you to distinguish tactical implementation as well as support and source used.
Thus, each link pointing to your site should be identifiable in order to evaluate its performance. You will be able to better track the origin and behavior of your visitors in a campaign. You can then make changes to your campaigns or reallocate the budget to the most profitable sources.
Returning to the example of the contest:
Several sponsored links campaigns on Facebook will be developed in order to reach different customer groups. It is also certain that several publications about the contest will be sent from the Facebook page of the company.
Therefore, two different communication media (General partners links and publications) will be used for the same traffic source (Facebook).
Also, we need to differentiate the targets in our sponsored campaigns, in order to properly evaluate the performance of each campaign.
By educating these parameters from URLs pointing to the competition, we will be able to make the decisions that will be needed in our campaigns and reallocate the budget to the most profitable sources.
No need to be a programmer to set the MTU of your URLs. The Google URL Builder tool can assist you in creating custom URLs campaigns and allow the monitoring of websites.
UTM parameters used above Google Analytics identify the source of users for each campaign. A specific report for each campaign will be accessible from Google Analytics. The most commonly used UTM parameters are:
Utm_campaign: It identifies the campaign by associating it with a name (example here: Giveaway 2014). You will agree that it is highly useful for centralizing behavior in a campaign.
Utm_medium: It can identify the medium used to bring traffic to the site (Examples: CPC, banner, email, organic, referent).
Utm_source: It identifies the source used (example here: 2015TransAm.Com, Google, Facebook Ads, Newsletter, etc.)
These parameters appear at the end of your URLs and have no influence on the content of your page. You will get the following result:
http://www.2015TransAm.Com/productname?utm_source=FacebookAds&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=Giveaway_2014
With these elements in place, you will have the turnkey to monitor the progress of your campaign.
5. Create a dashboard
Objective: To define an overview of the various decision support tools (KPI)
A dashboard is a visual representation in allowing a look to get an overview of a set of indicators that you have selected to accompany you in your decision making. These visualization tools must contain only the relevant information for your use and those of your superiors and be found and understood quickly.
The basic rules of effective dashboard:
Suitable: It should fit your audience and their obligations. Is it for your own use, or is it carried out for different department managers? In this situation, some information will prove to be basic for a marketing department and accessories for the heads. To accommodate the various players (the role of the manager, deep level data, understanding of comfort).
Clair: A dashboard should provide a clear overview of the behaviors recorded on the platform. It is necessary to organize it according to a conventional conversion process (Acquisition - Commitment - Conversion) to visualize the evolution of behavior.
Flexible: The dashboard must include features to make it more useful and meaningful way to help you understand the reasons behaviors on your site (filters, comparisons, alerts, exports)
Fast: Finally, it should allow you to make so that any user can save time getting his report instantly.
Example Of A Dashboard
With these elements in place, you will have the turnkey to fully monitor the progress of your campaign. Your attendance to follow your performance indicators and a degree of analysis and take over to determine actions to be taken on the way to achieve success.
And do not forget that sometimes it's the little things that can greatly improve the efficiency of your campaign. A review of the allocation of the budget between different tactics may be preferable to a profound change in your tactics.
Objective: To obtain the raw data
The measurement of a campaign web performance begins with the availability of data on your site. These data materialize in metric. It is precisely the functionality of a web analytics solution, or to capture the flow of activities on your website (the behavior of your visitors) to represent a real-time image or for a defined period of the behavior of your site web.
Google Analytics can be your starting solution, it is the most famous free analysis tool on the market. The data is recorded by the integration of a tracking code on all pages of your site. You then have access to hundreds of metrics to explore your data in detail, including:
Traffic sources (eg. 2000 visits from sponsored links)
Attendance statistics (eg. 10000 visits during the month of January)
Conversions (Ex. 150 sales since the beginning of the year)
The real-time data (visitors on your website)
From this point it is possible to organize these metrics and handle them properly to get a true representation of the behavior of your campaigns. However, having too many metrics can blur your vision. It is therefore necessary to set goals for the campaign and clarify the data to follow.
2. Set goals
Objective: Determining the framework of the campaign.
It is certain that as a marketing manager, your overall goal of the year will improve sales or visibility of your business. However, these goals alone can summarize the success of your campaign. They are too wide or unsuited to the criteria of a loyalty campaign or "nurturing". It is then necessary to set SMART goals, more accurate and easier to set up an effective monitoring process representing the key variables of your campaigns.
Remember, a SMART goal meets 5 criteria: it must be both Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-.
Let's review these 5 characteristics through an example:
The SMART goal: As part of an online contest operational for 3 weeks, we want to increase the number of subscribers to our newsletter by 1000.
Marketing initiatives undertaken: The competition is accessible from a landing page, the form will include a consent box for registration to the Newsletter. The competition will be supported by a particular sponsored link campaign to support participation.
The objective meets the five criteria:
Specific: Increased number of subscribers in to the newsletter by more than 1,000 people.
Measurable: The evolution of the number of subscribers before the contest and post-contest.
Achievable: The resources available are used to achieve this.
Realistic: The goal has been accomplished by other competitors of equivalent size.
Time: To be achieved within 3 weeks.
After defining the objectives, then it is high time to identify performance indicators to be used to evaluate the effectiveness of your campaign.
3. Establish its indicators
Objective: To help with the decision
Key performance indicators (KPIs) are used to measure the achievement of strategic objectives and performance of specific tactics in place to achieve them. KPIs are built around one or more metrics and other relevant variables (eg. Time) and should help you make a decision. Otherwise, it would mean that the indicator used is not suitable to your campaign. For example, one can find 15 performance indicators to follow your blog.
Indicators are first class allies to assist you in tracking your tactics. Objectively, it is preferable to use a handful of indicators representing the different levels of your campaign funnel. And I advise you to set them according to your funnel: Acquisition - Commitment - Conversion. So be sure to invite your immediate superiors in your working session to identify performance indicators they need to make decisions and to assess the profitability of their web investment.
Using the example of the contest and consider that sponsored links per campaign will support this goal.
Indicators to monitor in "Acquisition":
Click rate (for each PPC campaign).
The cost per click (PPC for each campaign).
Indicators to monitor in "Commitment":
The evolution of weekly visits from Quebec and from under the campaign locations.
The new sessions rates (to assess the quality of traffic: New or Recurrent)
Bounce rate on the form (the landing page assessment) by geographic region
Indicators to monitor in "Conversion"
The form's completion rate (evaluation form).
Now that the objectives and performance indicators are defined, it is then necessary to set up a personalized support structure of your campaigns.
This is effectively monitor the behavior of each tactical implementation, focusing closely visits that will be generated.
4. Structuring personalized campaigns
Objective: To optimize the relevance of performance indicators.
Is your initiatives that achieve actual results or an effect out of your control?
To answer this, it is necessary to be able to trace the flow of information from the origin of the visits. A tool like Google Analytics allows it to monitor traffic sources. By entering additional parameters to your URLs, the tools can then access additional data to isolate each of your marketing initiatives (ie using a different location), to distinguish each link that point to your site. These data should allow you to distinguish tactical implementation as well as support and source used.
Thus, each link pointing to your site should be identifiable in order to evaluate its performance. You will be able to better track the origin and behavior of your visitors in a campaign. You can then make changes to your campaigns or reallocate the budget to the most profitable sources.
Returning to the example of the contest:
Several sponsored links campaigns on Facebook will be developed in order to reach different customer groups. It is also certain that several publications about the contest will be sent from the Facebook page of the company.
Therefore, two different communication media (General partners links and publications) will be used for the same traffic source (Facebook).
Also, we need to differentiate the targets in our sponsored campaigns, in order to properly evaluate the performance of each campaign.
By educating these parameters from URLs pointing to the competition, we will be able to make the decisions that will be needed in our campaigns and reallocate the budget to the most profitable sources.
No need to be a programmer to set the MTU of your URLs. The Google URL Builder tool can assist you in creating custom URLs campaigns and allow the monitoring of websites.
UTM parameters used above Google Analytics identify the source of users for each campaign. A specific report for each campaign will be accessible from Google Analytics. The most commonly used UTM parameters are:
Utm_campaign: It identifies the campaign by associating it with a name (example here: Giveaway 2014). You will agree that it is highly useful for centralizing behavior in a campaign.
Utm_medium: It can identify the medium used to bring traffic to the site (Examples: CPC, banner, email, organic, referent).
Utm_source: It identifies the source used (example here: 2015TransAm.Com, Google, Facebook Ads, Newsletter, etc.)
These parameters appear at the end of your URLs and have no influence on the content of your page. You will get the following result:
http://www.2015TransAm.Com/productname?utm_source=FacebookAds&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=Giveaway_2014
With these elements in place, you will have the turnkey to monitor the progress of your campaign.
5. Create a dashboard
Objective: To define an overview of the various decision support tools (KPI)
A dashboard is a visual representation in allowing a look to get an overview of a set of indicators that you have selected to accompany you in your decision making. These visualization tools must contain only the relevant information for your use and those of your superiors and be found and understood quickly.
The basic rules of effective dashboard:
Suitable: It should fit your audience and their obligations. Is it for your own use, or is it carried out for different department managers? In this situation, some information will prove to be basic for a marketing department and accessories for the heads. To accommodate the various players (the role of the manager, deep level data, understanding of comfort).
Clair: A dashboard should provide a clear overview of the behaviors recorded on the platform. It is necessary to organize it according to a conventional conversion process (Acquisition - Commitment - Conversion) to visualize the evolution of behavior.
Flexible: The dashboard must include features to make it more useful and meaningful way to help you understand the reasons behaviors on your site (filters, comparisons, alerts, exports)
Fast: Finally, it should allow you to make so that any user can save time getting his report instantly.
Example Of A Dashboard
With these elements in place, you will have the turnkey to fully monitor the progress of your campaign. Your attendance to follow your performance indicators and a degree of analysis and take over to determine actions to be taken on the way to achieve success.
And do not forget that sometimes it's the little things that can greatly improve the efficiency of your campaign. A review of the allocation of the budget between different tactics may be preferable to a profound change in your tactics.