How to measure your marketing ROI

Why measuring & testing is crucial to marketing success.

Marketing is a game of inches. Inch by inch, little by little, if you’re doing the right things for the right audience, you’ll see a compounding improvement.

Without consistently analysing and measuring your marketing efforts to determine which areas are delivering and which aren’t – there’s no way of knowing what marketing channels or tactics are working for you.

There are plenty of tools and resources available to even the most in-experienced marketer these days.

Here are some quick and free ways to measure your marketing:

Google Analytics

This one is a no brainer. It’s free – and it’s essentially just a simple code (copy and paste) you put in to the back end of your website that then delivers all of your website, and even ad statistics to a very detailed but easy to interpret dashboard.

If you’re not confident tracking the more complex tasks like conversions and goals, you can still use Analytics quite easily to monitor your website traffic for traffic numbers, audience, page views and which pages are getting the most views, how much time people are spending on your site, where your traffic is coming from, and which pages they’re leaving your site on.

These kind of insights are priceless when it comes to making decisions about website improvements, optimising your content and making sure you have the right calls to actions in the right places.

Simple tweaks can lead to big improvements.

Sign Up Free For Google Analytics

Facebook Insights

If you’ve got social media accounts for your business you should regularly be monitoring what’s happening with your page audience. Facebook Insights provides a very easy to navigate dashboard which you can use to monitor things like new page likes and which posts get the most kind of interaction (so you can do more of it!) and who your audience is.

A/B Testing

With any marketing initiative you employ you should always try to find a way to test and measure your campaigns against past success and alternative versions. A/B Testing is essentially just comparing two versions of a message/campaign against each other to determine which one performs better.
Here’s a great in-depth article from HBR about A/B Testing if you’d like to know more about how it can be done and it’s benefits!

This allows you to drop what isn’t working, focus on what is, and over time make incremental improvements until you’re getting the best return on your marketing efforts.

A/B Testing can (and should!) be used for landing pages, email marketing campaigns (like different subject lines), web pages and call to actions, ad versions (Adwords and Facebook ads etc) and campaign messaging (as in, does this heading or offer get a better engagement than another one etc).

And again, this is where the Insights and Analytics we just spoke about come in really handy for tracking!

Ask us how we more than doubled the number (and halved the cost) of leads for one client in just 48hrs using insights we gained from A/B Testing!

Reporting software and platforms

There are so many options on the market that will do the work for you it would be impossible to list them all here. But if we look specifically at say, SEO, there are plenty of contenders fighting for your attention in the SEO reporting stakes.

These platforms allow you to regularly monitor and report on some of the really technical but important metrics that you should be basing your decisions and tactics on – like competitor search positioning, keyword suggestions and rankings, backlink reporting, and heaps more.

Some of the more popular platforms include SEMrush, Google Search Console, ahrefs, and one of our favourites, Seo PowerSuite.

Some are free or cheap, and some can get quite expensive. But its kind of like buying a Dyson, you get what you pay for!

So, if you aren’t measuring your marketing – or if you aren’t doing it regularly – start today.

Not only can keeping track of your success mean lower spends and higher success, it’s also the best way to keep track of your ROI.

Milk can help you monitor your marketing to ensure optimal success. We can provide services to help regularly monitor and report on your marketing efforts, provide one off site audits and strategies including recommendations for improvement and new opportunities, or we can also take care of all (or some) of your marketing for you either in-house or offsite (freelance) to make sure your marketing is measured and always improving!