Our Favourite Easy-to-Measure Marketing Techniques

It used to be very difficult to precisely measure the effectiveness of a marketing campaign. Businesses could spend thousands on TV adverts, yet never tell exactly how many people had seen the ads and made a sale. The whole process was shrouded in mystery until the rise of the internet. 

Technology has, by now, thoroughly revolutionised marketing, making it possible to target particular customers with your advertising, track your spending, and measure exactly how many times potential customers have seen your ads.

If you’re new to marketing then there are a few particularly effective techniques with easily measurable results, offering a good starting point to get to grips with your first marketing campaign.

One thing is crucial: getting all the measurements right. Fortunately, there is a vital piece of free software that does this for you: Google Analytics. You’ll need to install this onto your website in advance of any campaign, so that you can take some initial measurements as a benchmark to compare to later.

Here is a selection of our favourite marketing tools with which you can easily measure your results.  

1. Google Ads

Google Ads is the ideal tool for advertising in your local area. You simply pick the location in which you want to advertise, set your budget, and choose the search terms you want to appear against. Your ads then show up on Google’s results page whenever someone in your chosen location searches for these terms. These key metrics make measurement easy:

• New Users - how many visits your site received from entirely new users. You can also track your returning users.
• Clickthrough rate (CTR) - the rate at which your ads are clicked on after appearing to Google users.
• Cost-per-click (CPC) - the average amount that each individual click deducts from your budget.
• Click-to-call - believe it or not, you can even track how many calls have been made to your phone number through your ad

2. Online Banner Advertising

Banner ads are a ubiquitous form of online advertising, offering a huge variety of things to track, including: 

• Impressions -how often your ads were shown to your target audience, and can give you an idea of how much of your potential audience you've reached.
• Clickthrough Rate - as before, the rate at which impressions led to clicks. This is a useful means of finding your best advert. For instance, if you are running two or three ads for the same thing with different copy or images and one of them gets 90% of all clicks, then you know to reuse or emulate this ad in the future.
• UTM Links are bespoke URLs that you can easily create using Google’s own tool here for use on each individual banner ad. They tell Google Analytics how clicks from individual links should be counted and displayed to you. For instance, if you had two separate banner ads running on the same site and linking to the same page, you could give them two separate URLs so that Google Analytics could show you an exact picture of their respective performance.

3. Social Media

Social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram now provide their own comprehensive analytics services. If you have ads (or even just a page) on these channels, these in-site stats reports will tell you how well your posts are performing in satisfying detail. Here are just two of the metrics you can access on Facebook free of charge or effort:

• Reach - the number of people who have seen your post. This is divided into Organic reach (for posts you haven’t put any money into promoting) and Paid reach (for posts that you have). This is the most accurate measure of your brand awareness among Facebook’s audience.
• Engagement - the number of times people took some form of action on your post, whether a click, a like, a comment or a share. This provides an impression of how good your content is, informing your strategy for future posts.

4. Vouchers/Special Offers

The uptake of special offers is easily measured, either by advertising special codes to use at purchase, or by handing out physical vouchers to be redeemed in store. You can then track how many vouchers have been redeemed, and which codes from which advertising sources have generated sales. 

If you know what you’ve spent in each area of your marketing strategy and can measure how many people have visited your website, seen your advert, or redeemed your voucher, then you can compare this against the sales increase you’ve enjoyed. From here it’s a simple calculation to figure out how effective your marketing campaign has been. This should be your first step towards optimising your marketing so it works even better for you the next time round.

For more great advice on running impactful marketing campaigns, check out these articles:

• Five Key Stats To Track Your Online Advertising
• Top Marketing Techniques To Drive More Local Sales