Now that you have identified your goals, extracted and consolidated all relevant measurements, the next stage is to analyse your campaign/marketing performance. Use your Measurement Plan created during the “Plan” phase as a guide for the metrics data you need to pull. This is especially useful when you have multiple channels. Remember the illustrations to finding the X, Y & Z values?

Effectiveness Vs Efficiency

A good way to start evaluating your marketing performance is to list down some key business questions that will influence your next marketing plan. Essentially, you are trying to identify:

1.     Effectiveness– What’s effective in terms of meeting your KPIs.

Q: Which traffic source brought me most visitors?
A: Use traffic source breakdown from your web analytics tool to identify which source contributed most traffic.

2.     Efficiency – Can this be better? What is causing the drop off?

Q: Do my visitors checkout after adding items to their shopping cart?
A: Identify drop off rate in terms of page views between check outs and add to cart.

Between the two, identifying effectiveness is always much simpler since we are using a ranking system to compare between subjects. For example, Jane can easily identify the top 3 ad serving websites (e.g. hungrygowhere.sg, hardwarezone.com, etc...) or search keywords that brought her the highest traffic. Uncovering efficiency issues are slightly more complex and require more effort in terms of comparing against benchmarks and testing. We will be covering more about testing in the next section.

Benchmarks

When we use benchmark data, we are basically trying to identify if we are performing well against the average standards (either our own historical benchmarks or the industry benchmarks).

1. Own Data Benchmarks

Setting your own benchmarks with your historical data allows you to identify any unusual or trending behaviour with confidence since these benchmarks are unique to your business, target audience and their perception value towards your brand. It is free and much easier and quicker to obtain. This is usually done through year-on-year or month-on -month comparisons. You could also compare similar or seasonal campaigns that occurred in the past to identify improvements.

2. Industry/Platform Data Benchmarks

You may source and obtain industry data benchmarks from organizations such as Gartner, Forrester or eMarketer, etc. These reports however do not usually come free and would require either some payment or signing up for their services .A positive note about these reports is that they include detailed information including different industries and performance.

For specific online platforms like email or website, most “big name” (tools) such as Google Analytics, Sitecatalyst, MailChimp or Silverpop provide their own form of industry benchmarks based on the samples from their clients. You can find these reports easily via search engines or the respective websites of the tools you used. For example, in Google Analytics, you will find a benchmarking report in your tool’s navigation panel that allows you to compare your data with aggregated industry data from their clients who share their data. A quick search “email marketing benchmarks” and you will find email performance benchmarks from MailChimp, Silverpop, etc.