Digital measurement tools provide a wealth of useful statistical and analytical information about how, when and where customers interact and engage with your brand online.
The previous article briefly illustrates how a measurable digital campaign can keep the financial department satisfied that advertising budgets are being spent wisely (and improve marketing’s reputation!).
However, one of the most important takeaways from the the NCI Digital Marketing course to date, is that just because you can measure something, doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s useful information.
In order to make the most of digital measurement the following three principles apply:
1. Have Clear Goals
A huge amount of information can be generated from website and social media analytics. Measurement without a clearly defined goal will become quickly mired in all of this detail. You should know why you are measuring, as well as what.
2. Use Benchmarks
Analytics should be compared to statistics for a previous time period, or failing that, to those of a competitor, in order to see the changes in activity and customer behaviour. Benchmarks allow you to measure success.
3. Measure Like with Like
Compare website traffic, Facebook Likes, newsletter signups or any other metric, within the same categories and across the same exact timeframe in order to get an accurate representation of the changes in the campaign.
In short, a valuable digital campaign is one which has a clear purpose or goal, which can be easily measured against previous efforts and can therefore illustrate both its weakest and strongest aspects. This kind of targeted measurement allows digital campaigns to be tweaked for relevance and a better rate of return.
Further Reading: Paine, K. D 2011, Measure What Matters: Online Tools For Understanding Customers, Social Media, Engagement, and Key Relationships, Wiley