Before the advent of the internet, measuring the success (or failure) of your marketing campaigns was fairly simple. You calculated the money spent and measured in the rise in sales or revenue. However, tracking marketing ROI in the internet age is a whole different beast. For one, success isn't just increased sales. It could also be increased engagement, more leads, media hits or better brand awareness.
Moreover, even if you are only tracking sales and revenue, it is important to know what's contributing most to your rising sales. It could be email, social media, PPC campaigns or even your content campaigns. In digital marketing, you are engaging your target audience across channels (at times, even simultaneously).
Thankfully, as marketers, we now have some amazing tools that make the job of tracking marketing ROI simpler, and even possible. Here are our top picks out of the plethora of options available.
If you want a broad overview of your inbound website traffic, Google Analytics is the best place to start. The free tool gives you insights into your top traffic sources, along with basic metrics such as bounce rates and conversions. Easy integration with AdWords also allows you to measure the performance of your PPC campaigns.
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Facebook is the largest social media network and an essential part of any digital marketing plan. Facebook Insights give you a lot of important information on your audience, if you are willing to dig through all of the information they provide. In addition to basic metrics, such as “likes” and engagements, you can also learn more about your fans' demographics, what kind of content they react to most and even when they are more likely to react.
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Depending on your marketing goals, brand awareness can be an important metric to measure, and that's where BuzzSumo comes in. As the name suggests, BuzzSumo measures the amount of buzz you are creating online. It parses the entire web and picks up any mentions of your brand or the keywords or hashtags defined by you. If you are running an influencer marketing campaign, BuzzSumo is a must-have. It can help you hone in on the biggest influencers in your space, as well as keep track of what your competitors are doing.
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Every social media platform has built-in analytics. However, tracking performance of all your social media channels, individually, can be tedious. That's where HootSuite comes in. It pulls information from all your social media channels and collates it into one place. There is a free tier and a one-month free trial, as well. HootSuite also analyzes audience sentiment for you by tracking positive (or negative) mentions of your brand name.
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Much like what HootSuite does for social media reporting, Cyfe does it for the entire web. The tool comes with pre-built widgets that allow you to monitor all your marketing channels in one place, right from the get-go. In fact, Cyfe has made dashboards specific to marketing goals. For instance, if you are a start-up, Cyfe's dashboard will have widgets that track new subscriptions, app downloads and page likes.
You can even customize the dashboards to combine data sources for completely new insights.
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Internet users are spending more time on mobile devices. Mixpanel is a tool specifically meant to measure the effectiveness of your mobile marketing campaigns. It is especially handy for measuring app engagement levels, which can often go unanalyzed. Mixpanel lets you measure the number of new users, how they use your app and even how often they use it. Together with other tools mentioned here, this platform can be a powerful way to measure the ROI of your mobile marketing campaigns.
While Google Analytics can help you measure your inbound marketing efforts, it can be a little tedious to get around. HubSpot gives you a neat solution to that problem. It allows you track key metrics for social media, website visitors, CTAs, landing pages and even emails, quickly. It also helps you monitor your leads and thus take control of customer journeys.
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Companies swear by the effectiveness of email marketing. If you want to measure the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns, MailChimp is one of the best solutions out there. Even its free tier gives you access to basic metrics, such as open rates. You can even integrate your Google Analytics account for more insights.
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Still not sure about how to track marketing ROI? Contact us for more information at info@rmimpr.com or 480-305-2017. We can help you sift through all of your options and put a 100% measureable marketing plan in place.