Data analysis is the living heartbeat of a smart digital marketing campaign. If you’re sending out a bunch of content without measuring its effects, you’re going to be missing out on A LOT of important insights. Analytics can help you understand your traffic performance, readership engagement, and lead generation.
So, with that being said, what data should you actually be tracking in your digital marketing campaign?
It’s not uncommon for businesses to opt to view success through their amount of followers on social media, website clicks, and other metrics. However, those metrics only paint half the picture.
At the end of the day, the success of your marketing campaign isn’t whether you get more followers on social media or more traffic to your website. A smart digital marketing campaign drives leads that convert into clients.
For us, the most important two metrics are your cost-per-lead and your cost-per-client (aka Customer Acquisition Cost or CAC). If you are seeing your cost-per-lead and your cost-per-client go down, your marketing is working.
This isn’t to say you shouldn’t check your engagement rate based on time of day and type of post, nor to say tracking the change month-over-month, quarter-over-quarter, and year-over-year isn’t worth your time. It absolutely is. We look for seasonal swings that can inform our strategy to drive more quality traffic to you and build better relationships with human beings.
But if those improvements in your engagement rate on social (or reducing your bounce rate on your website) don’t improve your cost-per-lead or your cost-per-client, something isn’t working properly.
Why we say this: it’s easy to manipulate the data – you can post something controversial on social and see engagement skyrocket or stuff links into your highest trafficked pages to see your bounce rate go down. But if it doesn’t lead to more revenue, you’re still at the same point you were before the change.
In short: you want to focus on the right data instead of spending time on the fluff. Analyzing the right data will tell you how successful your strategy is, and they’ll help you craft even better content for even better results. Learning how to analyze marketing data is undoubtedly one of the most important aspects of running a successful marketing campaign.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed by data analysis, give us a call – we’ll take a look at your data at no cost and let you know what we think.