A membership organisation like your own most likely has ongoing marketing activities to help it flourish. They could be email campaigns, paid advertising, social media and more. However, it might be that you don’t know which of these activities work or which offer the best return for your organisation. Let’s explore why this is important and how to go about being in the know on your campaigns.
Why should you measure your campaign?
Running marketing campaigns for your organisation can take a lot of effort, resources and money. It’s therefore crucial to know if all of this was worth it, and to be able to report to your colleagues and superiors about the campaign.
Measuring a campaign’s effectiveness allows you to work out if the campaign made money back, and how much. If you run multiple campaigns you can see which of them, or which channels in general, work best and where you can improve. If you don’t measure effectiveness then you cannot deem a campaign a success or not.
What should you measure?
Choosing what to measure is crucial, and clearly varies by campaign. The desired outcome of the campaign should be known when forming ideas, therefore the KPIs for the campaign should match it. For a membership organisation the campaign aim is likely to be getting people to join or possibly event bookings.
As a bonus, by segmenting your campaign’s traffic you’ll be able to find out lots of secondary things about your campaign audience too.
How can you measure a campaign?
The key here is to ensure that you are “tagging” your campaign traffic so it shows as different traffic to the rest of your site. It might be tempting to make a hidden landing page, but this can often lead to other sources of traffic finding it. And you may wish to link straight to an existing page anyway.
In this example, we’ll use Google Analytics to tag the traffic, but the principles are similar across other stats apps. Handily, Google offers a tool to help you tag campaigns with minimal effort:
View Google’s Campaign Tagging Tool >
(If you’re using email marketing software, Adwords or other platforms then the tagging might be done for you automatically. Check before adding it in manually.)
The main fields to fill for each link in your campaign are:
- The link itself (e.g. http://www.website.com/conference)
- The campaign source (e.g. newsletter)
- The campaign medium (e.g. email)
- The campaign name (e.g. annual conference 2017)
You’ll then receive a link that looks like the following:
http://www.website.com/conference?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=annual%20conference%202017
Whenever you need to link to your page in this campaign, use this link instead. You have now tagged this traffic as people who have arrived from your newsletter. Do this for any campaign you run that does not automatically offer campaign tagging. Remember to re-use the tool for each source you use to send traffic to the page. Ensure the sources show in Analytics before the campaign runs so you know ahead of time if it is working.
How can you find, interpret and share results?
Once your campaign is complete, it is time to reflect upon how it did. You have already sectioned the campaign traffic off, so head over to the Campaigns screen in Analytics (Acquisition > Campaigns > All Campaigns) to get an overview of how it went. You can see basic traffic and goal completion stats for your campaigns here.
It might be tempting to stop there. There is nothing wrong with reporting these numbers to colleagues but it doesn’t really show the business side of the campaign. If you wanted people to join or book onto events (and therefore gain revenue), then go one stage further and calculate the return on investment (ROI).
- Manually calculate ROI by calculating total signup value over your costs for the campaign
- If you have goal values/eCommerce in your Analytics, then this can be automated
If you do this consistently across different campaigns you can work out the cost per signup in general, by the source of traffic or however you like. This data can be valuable in deciding which types of campaigns are best for you or, depending on your outlook, which ones you should aim to improve.
Because you tagged your traffic from your campaign in the steps above, you can find out anything you would usually find important about your campaign audience in Analytics. You can make and share reports to your colleagues and superiors so they can see the information that will interest them.
Summary
Now you understand the importance of measurement alongside picking what to measure for a campaign. You can now tag your audience as belonging to a certain campaign. Finally, you are able to measure how successful a campaign has been in terms of website stats and revenue and compare campaigns with your colleagues.
What do you think? If you have any questions or comments, why not put it to Andy below or get in touch with one of the Senior team.
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