Metrics to Measure Success of Online Marketing Campaigns for Ecommerce

It’s crucial that if you’re spending significant resources on your online marketing efforts that you look at certain metrics closely to measure the success of what you’re doing. From a question we got from a customer, we decided to make this into its own blog post.

Q: We’re spending over $6,000 monthly on online marketing. We’re not sure given our current sales which are steady at this point whether to decrease our spending or actually increase our marketing spending to increase sales. What’s the best way to measure our online marketing campaign?

A: That’s a great question and it’s quite complicated. There are several metrics I would use to measure the success of an overall marketing campaign and/or strategy. Let’s list the metrics you should be looking at daily or every few days to see what activity is going on.

SALES: Sales of course will guide us in the direction where we really want to be, right? If your sales aren’t good, you’re going to take immediate action in to doing something else and if are sales are very good, you may just keep riding the current strategy you’re working on. The truth is that sales isn’t ALWAYS telling of your marketing. A sale doesn’t only rely on your marketing and traffic you drive to your website but remember, in ecommerce, there are always conversion factors on the website that will heavily play a role with how your sales are which leads us to the second metric..

CONVERSION RATES: Conversion rates can be very telling of an online marketing strategy but AGAIN, your website design (conversion factors) will play a role that isn’t always telling of the marketing. However, if you’re targeting the right audience in your marketing, right demographic, you should see fairly well conversion rates.

ADD TO CART: You should be seeing a good amount of carts on a daily basis. Even if the carts are abandoned, you want to make sure that the traffic you are driving to your website are adding products to cart which is a signal of interest of products making sure you are driving the right traffic which of course is what will make a successful marketing campaign…DRIVING THE RIGHT TRAFFIC.

BOUNCE RATE/ TIME ON SITE: Both these metrics can be seen in Google Analytics and they are telling of the quality of traffic you are driving to your website. If you have a high bounce rate and low time on site, you are driving poor traffic to your website and should start making immediate changes either to your website or to your marketing. Low bounce rates and significant time on site is telling of quality traffic and good website structure for navigation.

VISITS TO PURCHASE: Another metric that is easily seen in Google Analytics will tell you a lot about your marketing and quality of traffic you’ve been driving. It’s important to note that all your sales of the traffic you drive on a daily basis won’t happen on the first day or first visit. This is an important metric to look at to see if the traffic you are driving will eventually be back to buy as they may be flocking to competitor websites and hopefully come back to purchase from your website.

Now, if you’re a company who allocates marketing dollars into different sources, it’s very important to measure EACH channel by looking at all these metrics if possible for that channel although all these metrics may not be available for every single channel. If you are spending significant time and resource let’s say on Facebook Ads or hiring someone to really manage and up your twitter, make sure you’re looking at your analytics for those channels and analyze their productivity to make sure it’s worth the time and resources.

Posted in Ecommerce Essentials & Tips