Even if you start out with a positive customer base, without a consistent flow of connections between you and your customers, your supply of business will slowly begin to dwindle.

That’s why every business needs an effective marketing campaign that will continuously grow their customer base and keep their business strong.

The challenge, however, is that marketing costs money.

So, while promoting your product endlessly out into the world is a dream, with limited resources, it’s more important that you know how to identify the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. That way, you can be confident that the money invested is going to those strategies that are yielding the best results.

We’ve put together several ways that you can measure how effective your marketing campaign really is, so you can optimize your efforts to get a better return on your investment.

1. Analyze the Marketing Elements

Your marketing plan likely has more than one element in place. Depending on the specifics of your plan, there are certain channels (such as Google or Facebook analytics) that will give you all the data you’ll need.

Focus on the subgroups, especially by marketing channel. For example, customers can land on your site in a wide variety of ways: web address, referrals, social media, or email. Evaluate the data from each channel to see which channels are producing the best results.

2. Decide on the Metrics

Naturally, you’ll want to look closely at your company’s ROI on marketing to make sure that you’re getting a good return for every dollar spent. When deciding your marketing metrics, it is just a matter of collecting the kind of data that will give you the perspective you need.

If you have clear goals in mind, it will be much easier to know when you’ve reached it, or to tell if your strategies are falling short of your mark.

Before you start, set some goals for your campaign. If you have clear goals in mind, it will be much easier to know when you’ve reached it, or to tell if your strategies are falling short of your mark.

When you have decided on your metrics, there are several ways you can generate data:

• Content: An analysis of how well your online content is at informing visitors and motivating them to take action can be quite revealing. The data you collect in this area will let you know if you have an effective campaign that is delivering quality content, or if you need to change it up.
• Lead Conversion: Data collected on the number of leads your campaign can convert into paying customers can provide insight on how difficult or easy it is for a new person to take the action you want. If your content is good, they should be able to follow your system all the way to a satisfactory conclusion. However, if something is lacking, they may will drop off the grid and you will have lost a customer.
• Individual Visitors: Follow the progress of each visitor over a period of time. You can even track how often they return.
• New/Returning Visitor: Data that shows how much new traffic your site is receiving.
• Click Through Rate: Relating to a particular page that requires the visitor to take a specific action in order for them to continue.
• Bounce Rate: How many visitors land on your page and then leave without taking the expected action.
• Page Views: The number of pages each visitor views on your site.
• Search Engine Referrals: A closer look at what keywords brought them to your page.
• Social Media Effectiveness: You can also measure likes, mentions, followers on social media sites to see just how many people you are reaching with your campaign.

3. Get the Tools

Once you’ve decided on the type of campaign you want to launch and which metrics you want to track, then all you need are the tools for measuring your outcome.

• Google Analytics provides several functions that will monitor the progress of your campaign and automatically send the collected data to everyone who needs it within your company.
• Kissmetrics tracks conversions from different channels to give you a full picture of how each subgroup is performing. You will be able to see where the majority of traffic to your site is coming from and the sources that are bringing in new customers.

To get the most out of your marketing efforts, you need to measure the success of each segment of your campaign. Smart marketers use all the marketing tools they can to collect the data and interpret it in a way that will lead to more success for their business.