It’s a common scenario.  Marketers in smaller businesses meet with management and decide to invest in a new online campaign for a product or service.  They all discuss how to structure the campaign – perhaps an email strategy that links to a micro-site or landing page or maybe a new site altogether.  The marketing team then writes up a request for proposal (RFP), solicits estimates, picks the provider they like best, and the new team rushes towards the deadline.  Intense discussion of the best look and feel and wording induces stress.  The project is completed, and then it’s only updated again when content needs to change. No attempts are made to quantitatively measure the success of the site!

Quite common in larger organizations with enviable budgets, but frequently absent with smaller operations is this analysis of the project’s success.  What return on investment (ROI) did the campaign provide?  How could it have been better? Can changes be made now to improve it moving forward?

Different versions of design and copy can have a surprising impact towards enticing potential customers. Before a large company like Coca-Cola opts for a big advertising buy, they do market testing to see how effective their new ads are. They run focus groups, take surveys, even perform eye tracking and pupil dilation tests.  After the ad is run, they analyze the response to see how effective it was. They take this analysis into consideration, make improvements to future ads and update the existing one. These practices assure that Coke gets the best return on their marketing dollar.

Smaller businesses though, can’t afford to conduct these types of metric tests for their relatively small campaigns. Commonly the budget is completely spent after the initial design and development. Fortunately though there are many techniques and simple steps that allow businesses to generate the best campaigns they can with the budgets they have. More than anything, just getting into the measuring mindset puts your campaign on the right track.

Here are some ideas to get the analytical juices flowing.

Sample Email Metrics

1) When creating a new email marketing campaign, consider doing several variations.  Take the best design ideas and copy and instead of picking one version to send to your entire distribution list, create multiple versions and send these each to a different small random subset of your audience.  After giving the recipients a day or two to process the emails, review the analysis metrics of the initial mailing.

A sample of metrics from a Constant Contact mailing shows several simple statistics that can be used to judge the success of a mailing.  The percentage of ‘Opens’ that your email received shows how many were enticed enough by the subject line to open the message. Comparing this rate among all of your initial sent versions will tell you which one was most successful subject line.

The same logic can be applied to the click-through numbers. First, which email has the highest percentage of clicks – this one has the most appealing design to your target audience. If you use different copy to link to the same outbound destinations, which email had the most successful click-through percentage?  That’s the one that described the link the best. In our sample, landing3’s copy was the most successful.

Once you’ve analyzed these numbers, revisit your email ideas and create a new version using the best subject line, design and content. Send this email to the remainder of your distribution list. This extra legwork will assure that you’re sending the best email you can.  Never forget that you’re marketing to your customers, not to yourself.  What they find most intriguing often isn’t what you’d expect them to. Marketing research will tell you what’s really most important and interesting to them.

If you’d like to learn more about these metrics, there are many great resources available.  Large email campaign management services often offer lots of suggestions and ideas.  MailChimp offers a nice article about understanding email campaign reports. Vertical Response offers webinars about many useful topics such as writing good marketing copy.

2) When it comes to your actual website, hands down, the most robust, documented and affordable (free!) metrics tool is Google Analytics. A full overview of Google Analytics’ features is beyond the scope of this post, but even a basic knowledge of the tool can really help you to make subtle changes that significantly improve your site’s appeal.

Google Analytics Dashboard

After installing the Google Analytics code to your site and allowing a few days for data to gather, the dashboard is your starting point to begin mining through your newfound data.  Clicking through from this point you can view where your visitors are coming from, both in terms of geography and referring websites. You can see how long your visitors stay, where they click and what page they were viewing when they lost interest. These available metrics are just the tip of the iceberg.

A simple tactic to visualize your page’s link success is the ‘Site Overlay’ feature. This is accessible under the Content menu and shows you the percentage of users that click on each specific link on a page. Is the prominent text link in the top left of your homepage getting as high a percentage of the clicks as you’d prefer?  Now you can know for sure and tweak the copy or imagery if necessary to see if other approaches are more successful. Frequent review of the click trends can help you judge the success of all of your site’s elements.  Mindful tweaks over time assure you better success.

Google Analytics Site Overaly

3) The last idea is a combination of the two ideas discussed so far. This approach is most practical for single website pages as opposed to complete websites, as multiple versions of the page need to be developed. Instead of deciding on and creating just one page when multiple versions of copy and design are debated, create them all, and then set the actual landing page to randomly load one of the page concepts (your web developer can accomplish this with some simple JavaScript).  Review the Google Analytics for each version of the page to see which one was most “sticky” (kept the most users interested) and find which elements of the pages were most clicked. Use this information to craft an ultimate page that combines the most successful elements.

These simple ideas are within just about any web campaign budget and hopefully can get you and your staff thinking of other ways to measure your ROI. Websites are easily changeable. Monitoring their success and making adjustments when necessary helps the site remain viable and interesting. Remember, if you aren’t measuring it, you aren’t managing it!