Why You Should Measure & Tactical Takeaways for Measuring Your Marketing

posted by Hayley Warack on December 31, 2015 in Converge Blog

The goal of measurement is to improve and context is everything. Shelby Thayer of Penn State Outreach and Online Education presented Effective Marketing Measurement at Converge 2015. Her informative session reviewed the measurement landscape, why we should measure and tactical takeaways for measuring your marketing initiatives.

So why measure?

Data measurement helps you measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and also provides data to strategically help you optimize your website. The goal of any performance measurement is to be able to improve you efforts ongoing.

Starting Out

Before you can effectively measure you need to start by defining your objectives and goals. Why do you exist? Why does your website exist? An admissions team exists to get students and their website exists to help get these students by informing, gathering leads and making it possible for these users to apply, register for an event or schedule a campus visit.

Micro and Macro Goals

Think about your main goals and then those steps that lead to you achieving those goals. All of these goals should be measured.

Trackable URLs

In order to successfully track campaign performance in Google Analytics, you need create trackable URLs using standardized tracking parameters. Using Google’s URL Builder tool allows you to track your URLs in a way that makes it extremely easy to view and report on data in Google Analytics.

Your institution should create a document standardizing these tracking parameters for consistency.

Measuring Performance

Measuring to campaign goals are key. First, define your goals and assess your audience and where they are at in the recruitment funnel. Utilizing landing pages and a single call-to-action to helps increase conversion rates by keeping the user focused on a single objective.

Email

Similar to other any other marketing campaign, defining the goal of your email is the first step. Are you trying to get the ready to do something? Sign up for a webinar? Register for a class? Or are you just trying to inform?

Some key metrics to look at for measuring email success are:

Delivery Rate
Open Rate
Click-Through Rate
Spam Rate
Unsubscribe Rate

Go beyond the click-through and also look at bounce rate, average sessions length, conversions (micro and macro) and conversion data in your CRM (implementing trackable URLs is extremely important here).

Internal Site Search

Looking at internal site search metrics can be extremely beneficial as well. By analyzing metrics (time after search depth, average search depth, etc) with the different searches, you can better understand what your user is looking for and assess what topics you may need to create more content around.

Testing

Testing landing pages, ads and emails prior to launch and throughout the campaign is essential. Test subject lines, imagery, messaging, etc. to better understand what your audience is the most responsive to. Also, with mobile traffic continuing to increase, make sure to evaluate the appearance and performance of your campaign assets on mobile devices.

Attribution

Having an attribution model is essential for attributing credit to different marketing efforts. Users often have multiple touch points with your brand before converting so its important to have a system in place for how you plan to attribute that data.

There are many different attribution models to consider when deciding what method might be best for your marketing efforts.

Last Interaction: use when your time-to-convert is very short or you run a lot of campaigns focused on people at the buying stage of the funnel
Last Non-Direct Interaction: used in all other reports as the default, so it may make sense to use this in MCF report as well.
First Interaction: use if you are just starting out and brand awareness is the most important thing (for most of us this will not be the model we’d choose)
Linear: use this if you want to attribute weight equally among all touch points.
Time Decay: Use this if you have a short consideration period.
Position Based: Use if you want to consider the initial interaction and final interaction the most important – maybe if you’re running both brand awareness campaigns as well as campaigns targeted at those at the final stages of the buying cycle.

Tools & Resources