Digital marketers aren’t just tasked with creating and executing their campaigns. They also need to prove — to themselves and their superiors — that their efforts were worthwhile. If you have good marketing campaign measurement tools, this final campaign phase comes much easier.
Every digital marketing campaign leaves a trail of breadcrumbs behind that let you know how it performed. Those breadcrumbs (or marketing metrics) help you decide what worked and what didn’t.
Your mission is to find a KPI to measure marketing campaign outcomes. From there, you can use your findings to improve future campaigns.
Here’s why you need to measure your marketing KPIs and how to choose the best marketing measurement tools for the job.
Table of Contents:
What Are Marketing Campaign Measurement Tools?
Why Are Marketing Campaign Measurement Tools Important?
How Do You Measure Success?
The Top 5 Digital Marketing Campaign Measurement Tools
The Top 4 Social Media Campaign Measurement Tools
Tip: Learn more about campaign measurement in general and how to measure digital marketing campaigns.
What Are Marketing Campaign Measurement Tools?
Marketing campaign measurement tools help you choose metrics to measure campaign success, then track those metrics on your behalf.
You can see things like
- content engagement
- social media likes and shares
- audience growth
- email open rates
- and more
From there, you can apply those metrics to your campaign outcomes and see the progress you’re making toward your goals.
Centralizing your metrics in a single platform helps you focus on what’s important. You can track all of your most important metrics in a single view, then dive deeper into each one.
Why Are Marketing Campaign Measurement Tools Important?
As the world of marketing evolves, so do the ways we measure the success of our campaigns. Marketing campaign measurement tools matter because they allow businesses to track how effective their marketing efforts are. With better insights into your marketing KPIs, you can make necessary and impactful adjustments to get better results in the future.
There are a variety of social analytics tools available, each designed to track different aspects of a campaign. For example, some tools focus on measuring reach, while others track engagement or conversions. By using a combination of these tools, businesses can get a holistic view of their campaign's performance.
Not only do marketing campaign measurement tools help businesses understand their own performance, but they also provide valuable insights into the effectiveness of their competition. Keeping tabs on what's working (and what's not) allows businesses to stay one step ahead of the competition.
In today's competitive landscape, having access to accurate and actionable data is more important than ever before. With the right tools, you can remove much of the guesswork from understanding your digital marketing metrics and prove your campaign’s effectiveness to C-suite leaders and stakeholders.
How Do You Measure Success?
In the past, marketers would compare revenue lift or sales lift before and after the campaign. But that’s no longer enough to define true marketing campaign success.
That’s because marketing is both a short and a long game. It’s not just about short-term wins, although that can be part of your big-picture strategy. You also want to see how your campaigns are building loyalty, creating brand advocates, increasing your brand image and consumer sentiment, and taking more of the conversation, year over year.
That’s why marketers need to look beyond sales and website traffic; they are temporary success indicators that don’t support long-term growth. Measuring campaign success metrics with comprehensive tools can give you a clearer picture of your efforts, now and over time.
To measure the success of a marketing campaign, you need to set clear goals from the outset and establish KPIs to track progress. Without this data, it's impossible to know if your campaign has been successful.
There are a number of ways to measure marketing campaign success. We’ve already mentioned sales and web traffic, but other factors, such as brand awareness and engagement, also matter. Click-through rates, email marketing metrics, content marketing metrics, general marketing metrics, and social media metrics can also play a role, depending on your campaign.
You'll need to track all relevant data points and compare them against your business goals. Only then can you make informed decisions about what's working and what isn't.
The Top 5 Digital Marketing Campaign Measurement Tools
Building your digital marketing campaign measurement toolkit starts with knowing what success looks like to you. From there, you can decide which marketing campaign measurement metrics to track, then choose tools to simplify the process.
Here are some of the top tools to measure marketing ROI and propel your campaigns forward.
1. Meltwater
The Meltwater Suite helps brands collect insights from across the web. It tracks mentions, topics, and conversations across podcasts, social media, news outlets, blogs, and other sources to help you see how your brand performs across channels.
For example, if you’re running a brand awareness campaign, Meltwater's media monitoring suite can help you monitor brand growth and measure your brand awareness.
- See how people are talking about your brand
- Find out where those conversations are happening
- Estimate content marketing ROI
- Track your reputation
- Learn how people feel about your brand.
All of these data-driven insights go well beyond one-off sales. They show that your brand has staying power with its core audience. Plus, you can collect these insights on an ongoing basis, not just with single campaigns.
2. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is the quintessential analytics service that provides insights into your website traffic and marketing effectiveness. More than just a simple hit counter, Google Analytics lets you measure your return on investment, track your goals, and understand your customers' behavior.
Google Analytics helps you understand how people find and use your site so that you can keep them coming back. See how many people are finding you through various channels, then build a new tactic into your marketing plan to get more traffic from those channels.
There are many other web analytic tools available, but Google Analytics has several advantages. First of all, it's completely free. It integrates well with other Google products, such as AdWords and Gmail. Also, it provides an enormous amount of data and analysis options.
3. Ahrefs
This powerful backlink analysis tool helps you see how your authority is growing online. Backlinks are testaments that other websites have found your content valuable and helpful. These links also provide free traffic to your website from search engines, plus they can help improve your organic search rankings by acting as quality signals.
As you’re investing in digital content creation, monitoring your backlink performance is a must. Ahrefs offers helpful backlink data and helps you track your rankings over time.
In addition, you can run site audits to help you optimize your content for even better organic performance. Optimization allows you to capture free organic traffic via search, which may help you reduce your reliance on paid ads.
4. Hotjar
You work hard enough to drive traffic to your website. The last thing you want to do is chase those leads away with a poor user experience. That’s where Hotjar comes in handy.
Hotjar provides an easy way to see what users are doing on your site. With heatmaps, you can see where users are clicking and how far they scroll down the page. This data can help to add context to things like bounce rate and conversion rate. Use this information to improve the user experience on your site.
This marketing measurement tool also offers session recordings, which show you how individual users interact with your site. This can be helpful for identifying problem areas on your site or for seeing how users react to new features.
5. Mixpanel
Mixpanel is a marketing measurement tool that shows you how people are using your site or app, what features they’re using the most, and where they’re coming from.
It also allows you to segment your users so you can better target them with messaging and content.
For example, you might want to send a message only to those who haven’t used your app in a while, or only to those who have made a purchase.
Segmentation lets you be more strategic with your communications, which can lead to better engagement and conversions.
The Top 4 Social Media Campaign Measurement Tools
Social media plays a key role in many digital marketing campaigns, and therefore should be included in your campaign measurement metrics. Dedicated tools can help you track your social media performance and connect those metrics to your overall objectives.
Reading Tip: How To Measure Social Media Campaign Success
Here are our favorite social media campaign measurement tools to support your strategy:
1. Meltwater
Meltwater's easy-to-use consumer intelligence platform gives you more ways to empower your social strategy. AI technology combines with human data scientists to turn social data into actionable insights. It collects real-time data from a variety of social media and other sources.
What makes Meltwater Radarly unique is how it translates the data for you. No more digging or guessing about what the data means or why it’s important. This is a huge time-saver for marketers that want to cut to the chase and start using their insights.
The platform gives brands a single source of truth to track their marketing efforts. Measure campaign performance across all your channels, make changes on the fly, and keep hitting those KPIs.
Tip: Check out our guide to the top consumer insights tools & companies.
2. Hootsuite
A leading name in social media management, Hootsuite, offers user-friendly scheduling to make your social media more hands-off. What’s more, you can track each post’s performance via the same platform.
This is a huge timesaver compared to switching between social media apps and using built-in analytics. Hootsuite gives you some basic insights, like follower count, audience growth, content engagement, and more.
Combined with data from other sources and platforms, marketers can get quick and easy insights into their performance.
Tip: Check out more Hootsuite alternatives
3. HubSpot
HubSpot excels with inbound marketing strategies and analytics. Whether you’re directing clients to a landing page or want to A/B test your CTAs, HubSpot can help you maximize your campaigns.
Easy-to-read dashboards let you track your campaigns at a glance. See where your website visitors are coming from and how your social media is playing a role in your success. You can also review things like inbound links and how you stack up against your competitors.
4. Mailchimp
For digital marketing campaigns, Mailchimp packs a one-two punch. It’s the best free email marketing software you can get, but its features don’t end there.
You can also use Mailchimp to create landing pages, social media ads, and other creative content to connect with your audience. Map out the customer journey and create personalized experiences based on how your customers interact with your content.
Strong reporting features show you key metrics to measure campaign effectiveness. You don’t have to pick and choose what to measure — just check your built-in analytics and keep moving!
Choosing the Right Metrics to Measure Marketing Campaign Success!
Every marketer needs to know which metrics to use to measure the success of marketing campaign outcomes. This process becomes nearly effortless when you have the right marketing campaign measurement tools.
Meltwater can help you with this process. Simply fill out the following form to get a free tour of our platform.
