Optimizing your campaign for the best results

Management guru, Peter Drucker, once said, “What gets measured, gets managed.” In today’s world, we can add a bit: what gets measured, gets optimized and delivers the best campaign results — right to your bottom line!

So how do you do it? Well, first you need to determine what key performance indicators (KPIs) and variables to track. On a high-level, metrics and variables tend to fall into four categories:

• Distribution: Channel, platform
• Target: Geo, demographic, psychographic, interests
• Awareness: Impressions, views, visits
• Engagement: Clicks, likes, shares

Select the exact metrics to follow depending upon the channels in your marketing plan. Here are some examples:

• Email: open rates, click through rates, unsubscribes, undeliverables, bounce rates
• Social media: impressions, likes, comments, shares
• Video: views, completion rates
• Banners: impressions, click through rates
• Print/mail: mail quantity, responses, response rate
• Website: overall visits, new visits, source of traffic, top landing pages, page views per visit, time on site, referrals

While you will want to collect data on all the possible metrics for your channels, you should pick one or maybe two primary goals, communicate them to anyone working on the campaign, and highlight the KPIs that will show your results most clearly.

For example, let’s say you have a primary goal of lead generation, meaning that you will want new prospects’ names and a way to connect with them, such as an email. Your first KPI might be click-throughs to a website page with a form that collects the name and email address. So you would want to optimize your ad to encourage click throughs with a strong call to action (CTA).

Your next goal is getting people to fill out the form, so you’ll make sure the form isn’t long, asking for too much info, or getting too personal. And you’ll want it to encourage people to finish filling it out, usually by offering something in return like an interesting download or newsletter.

For each goal, take a stab at deciding what you expect for a metric. If you can, get some benchmark industry statistics. If the average email open rate is 12% in your industry, is it reasonable to expect 35% without any previous results? Having outsized expectations can be a costly mistake. A little research goes a long way.

Whether or not you have a benchmark, set yourself a goal and start measuring from day one. With digital channels, you can check in real-time and evaluate results right away. Keep in mind that engagement can be impacted by distractions like big events (celebrity breakup got everyone distracted?), by the weather (fewer opens on a gorgeous beach day?), or other influences. Take a few days to identify trends before making any changes. But start watching right away so you’ll see trends. You also will want to check the results to make sure your campaign is running correctly — with the right creative, on the right channels, etc. Consider if the initial impressions and early results make sense. If they don’t — like absolutely no engagement at all — then look for a reason. Maybe the ads that were supposed to show at 4PM are showing at 4AM because of a typo.

If you’re confident that the campaign is running properly, then continue to peek at the results daily. You’ll start to get an idea of the numbers, see trends emerging, and begin having ideas for optimization, like running more of that one ad that’s outperforming all the others. Once you have enough data, you can identify solid trends to guide adjustments, which is where the optimization really takes place.