Technology has fundamentally altered the way we search for products and services, meaning it is now more important than ever to invest in digital marketing. But how can you know what’s working? Chris Robinson, the Managing Director at leading digital marketing agency Adtrak, gives us his six tips for measuring success.

Visitors to your website

The starting point for assessing the success of any digital marketing campaign is to find out how many people visit your website as a result. This is simple enough to do in Google Analytics as you’ll be able to see exactly when people visit, allowing you to compare spikes in visitors with your marketing activities.

If you’ve invested in the subtle art of SEO, you should also be looking at a gradual increase in the number of visitors you receive.

Lead to visitor ratio

The best way to assess the effectiveness of your website is to check your lead to visitor ratio. If your marketing is doing its job, you should not only see plenty of visitors to your website, but also lots of leads – whether in the form of a phone call, email or contact form completion.

You can monitor the number of online leads you get by setting up ‘Goals’ on Google Analytics. Then, you can simply log into the dashboard and compare the number of leads to the number of visitors.

Call tracking software

Call tracking software may not be something you’ve considered before, but it can give you a real insight into the success of each marketing campaign.

Simply put, call tracking software allows you to allocate a different phone number to each marketing channel or platform you use. This means you can easily report on the number of leads you receive and measure the success of each campaign, allowing you to refocus your strategy and gain maximum return.

Impressions and clicks

If you have produced paid marketing campaigns, the best metrics to review are the number of impressions and clicks you are achieving. The number of impressions each advert achieves will let you know how many times the ad has been displayed and by comparing this figure with the number of clicks you receive, you’ll get a good idea of each advert’s effectiveness.

If you get lots of impressions, but not many clicks, you can tweak your advert, perhaps to focus on a different offer or unique selling point. You pay per click, so it’s essential your ads are relevant to the search term.

Ask for a report!

If you’re paying for digital marketing and aren’t sure about its return, ask for a report.

Any reputable marketing agency will be happy to share the secrets of your campaigns with you, make recommendations based on your business objectives and talk you through how they measure the results.

Sales

Ultimately, the best metric to gauge the success of your marketing is the number of sales you make. Whilst you may be looking for creativity from your marketing team, it’s essential that the content is effective, not just attractive.

Whilst paid advertising should provide a fairly fast return on investment, not all marketing efforts will pay off immediately. Traditional SEO techniques rely heavily on organic rankings and this can take a few months to establish. But if you aren’t seeing an increase in enquiries within six months, you should consider an alternative route to marketing your business.

Adtrak is a leading digital marketing agency based in the heart of Nottingham in the East Midlands, working with clients in all sectors across the UK and internationally. For more information visit www.adtrak.co.uk.