Marketing Analytics are Fun

Posted on 08/18/2010, by DMC

Now don’t get me wrong, I love a well designed ad or campaign just like everyone else. I get caught up in the emotion of rocking headlines, inspiring visuals and body copy that tugs at my heartstrings. Recently, I was completely inspired by the campaign that Nike did for the World Cup (below).

However, as we’re going through our day-to-day providing strategic marketing services to our clients, I also get really excited to dive into the analytics of HOW the campaigns we build are actually doing the job we design and architect them to do. Marketing analytics play a huge role in the success of any marketing campaign. Right now we’re not talking about some of the core operational metrics we deal with everyday like conversions, close rates, customer lifetime value, etc. Here are five of my current online faves we use in analyzing the success of our marketing campaigns.

Open/Click Through Rates

The bread and butter analytic measurement for e-mail campaigns. Just knowing these two things can give you tremendous insight into the value of your e-mail marketing campaign. Is the subject line engaging enough for our prospect list to open the e-mail and see what’s inside? One of our best read e-mails carried the subject line, “a left brain and right brain walk into a bar.” Then once they’re in are they clicking on the link(s) that we want them to?

Shares/Retweets

With social media waging war for their piece of marketing budgets – and with programs being executed only sparingly well – how do we provide vision to marketing executives that social efforts are working? One great way to do that is shares/retweet. It’s surprising simple from a back end perspective and will help frame the discussion about how a particular campaign is growing a client’s community. And really in this world isn’t share the new “convert” anyway? Want to broaden your message, extend your reach and influence residents on a peer-to-peer level? Click to share.

Capture Forms/Landing Pages

The Robin to an e-mail marketing campaign’s Batman. Get people to click through to a landing page and you’re half way home. Those folks are ready for more detailed sales information and they’re open to the next conversation – the capture form. Think carefully here and don’t get too greedy. What information do you really need to take the next step? E-mail address, Twitter handle, name and company? Don’t try to get it all at once, you’ll scare off more people than you convert . . . and give yourself more reason to continue to nurture those leads.

Non-Branded Organic Traffic

Warning, I’m about to get my SEO geek on. It’s great that customers and prospects can remember and type in the web address. It’s the rest of the world that intrigues me. How we can keep traffic growing among those visitors who don’t know a site well enough to type in the address directly? To have a site come up in search results, etc. Those are new and potentially very valuable visitors. By the same token, for the most part we ignore traffic stats for the home page. Of course people come to the home page more than anything else. I’m far more interested in what inside pages are getting the most traffic. Are they the pages we expected with our architecture and design? If not, what’s missing?

Traffic Spikes

What makes site traffic go wild? Blog posts, and e-mail distributions? Does traffic spike higher when the post or e-mail is paired with social media outreach? How long does the bump last from a single post/distribution? And how can we make that peek last as long as possible? We love to look at this data to help determine the types of content to focus on for a particular audience. Take this in comparison with overall weekly traffic and you can come to some good conclusions on not only effective subject matter but days of the week people are most likely to be on your site anyway. Obviously a tool like Google Analytics is a must have.

Data is the best friend of successful marketing campaigns. What are some of your favorite metrics for analyzing he success of marketing campaigns? Let us know – it’s all gravy.