Marketing campaign data analysis

9 min read

The process of brainstorming, planning, and delivering a marketing campaign is equal parts fun, challenging, and rewarding. However, as a marketer, your role in the process shouldn’t end when your campaign concludes. In fact, analysing the effectiveness of your campaign is arguably the most important step in the process. This is because it’s the only truly accurate way of understanding what about your campaign worked well, which areas underperformed, and how you can improve in the future.  

In this post, we’ll take a detailed look at the marketing campaign data analysis process. In doing so, we’ll outline how to start the process, what you should do with the campaign data, and how to avoid common pitfalls. We’ll then conclude by showing you exactly how our software can help you turn your data into actionable insights.

How to start the marketing analytics process

Every company, brand, and agency approaches their marketing campaigns differently. For example, while a small business may run a simple campaign on a single channel, a multinational corporation might instead create a complex and multifaceted campaign.

However, the complexity of the campaign shouldn’t provide a stumbling block when it comes to analysing campaign effectiveness. This is because, no matter the scale of the campaign you’re analysing, you should make sure your analysis answers all of the following questions:

• What elements of the campaign worked well?
• Which elements of the campaign didn’t function in the desired way?
• How did the target audience respond to the campaign?
• How did the campaign perform against the objectives?
• What information can we take into future campaigns to improve efficiency and ROI?

To start the marketing analytics process, you’ll need to gather all of the data that’s related to your campaign. Ideally, you have a contact history that spans all channels and is able to collect response data. The exact data points that will determine the successes and failures of your campaign will depend on what your campaign objectives were. For example, if you were looking to sell more products, then sales data will be more useful than social media interactions. 

It’s also important to distinguish between campaign results and outcomes here. Results are smaller metrics that make up an individual campaign. Typical key marketing metrics to analyse campaign results are: 

• Total website visits
• New sessions
• Traffic channels
• Bounce rates
• Total conversions
• Cost per lead
• Return on investment
• Social media engagement rates
• Reach by channel

Campaign outcomes describe the long-term effect that your campaigns have on your business. This is typically measured with metrics such as: 

• Customer retention rates 
• Customer loyalty 
• Churn rates 
• Number of sales 
• Number of acquired customers

What to do with the campaign data

Once you’ve gathered all of your marketing campaign data, it’s time to analyse it. With this in mind, let’s take a look at four key steps involved in marketing campaign data analysis:

1. Review your objectives and KPIs

Throughout the marketing campaign data analysis process, your number one priority should be assessing how the campaign performed against its objectives and KPIs. As a result, to set the right context and tone for your analysis, you should start by listing these goals.

By being clear about what you were looking to achieve through the campaign, you’ll find it much easier to associate campaign results with desired outcomes. It will also be far simpler for you to make sense of the data you have in front of you.

2. Break down results by channel

Once you have an overall idea of how your campaign performed against its goals, you need to break down how each individual element of the campaign contributed to this.

At this stage, you should focus on key channels (both in terms of over and under performance), channel-by-channel objectives, and channel-by-channel metrics. The data you need to analyse for this will depend on the channels you utilised. However, here are some examples of the data types you should be searching for and analysing, for several key channels:

Search

If you were hoping to influence people at the decision stage of the sales funnel and drive action, then it’s likely you utilised paid and organic search activity. If this was the case, make sure you analyse all of the following metrics:

• Quality score: Including the quality and relevance of your paid search landing page
• Click through rate: A measure of how well your keywords and ads performed
• Impressions: The number of times your ads were viewed by searchers
• Average position: A measure of how your ads or keywords performed against other ads or your competitors
• Conversion rate: How many people who clicked through ultimately took the desired action?

Website

For most marketing campaigns, a company’s own website acts as a focal point that brings together key messages, creative ideas, and conversion points. Due to this, the majority of marketing teams develop specific campaign landing pages or microsites. If you took this action in a bid to drive action and engagement, then ensure that you analyse all the following pieces of marketing campaign data:

• Total traffic: This will provide you with a macro view of how the campaign has driven traffic to the site
• Traffic by channel: This will then show you which channels were driving traffic
• Bounce rate: The percentage of visitors that were leaving before taking the desired action
• Conversions: A quantifiable measure of how many visitors performed your desired action after reaching your site
• Data capture: A measure of the quality of the data you obtained from your visitors

Social media

Lots of marketing campaigns use social media to drive reach and awareness for the brand (both through organic means and as a paid channel). If this was the case with your campaign, ensure you have the data on the following metrics:

• Brand buzz: The number of conversations that are taking place on social media platforms about your brand and your campaign (you can also break this down by social media platform)
• Positive earned media: The number of users who have shared your content positively (it's important to exclude any negative mentions here as they have not helped you achieve your goal)
• Percentage of the target audience reached: How effectively your adverts reached the right people
• Frequency: The number of times the advert was shown to the same person across different channels
• Click-through-rate: The measure of how many people who view a social post then click through to take some form of action, such as purchasing a product

Email 

Email marketing is a great way of staying in touch with your audience in a personalised way. It can also help you promote your campaign in an affordable manner. If you’ve used email marketing for your campaign, then make sure you analyse all the following metrics: 

• Conversion rate: The percentage of email recipients who clicked on a link within an email and completed your desired action
• Click-through-rate: The percentage of your recipients who clicked on one or more of the links within your email 
• Overall ROI: The overall return on investment for your email campaign (total revenue divided by total spend)
• Open rate: This is the percentage of email recipients who opened your email. This can show you how well you optimised your subject lines

Direct mail 

Direct mail is a fantastic way to reach your audience, grab their attention, and connect with them on a personal level. If you’re marketing using direct mail alongside a digital marketing campaign, then make sure that you’re assessing these metrics: 

• Response rate: A simple metric, this is the percentage of people on your mailing list who respond to your direct mail campaign. This can be tracked using promo codes, phone numbers, and QR codes
• Conversion rate: Your campaign’s conversion rate can give you more perspective on the performance of your direct mail campaign. While a response rate can tell you how many people signed up for a free trial or a promotion, the conversion rate can tell you how many of those people became paying customers 
• Cost per acquisition: To calculate this metric, you can divide the total campaign cost by the number of orders you received. By doing the same calculation across your other marketing channels, you can directly compare each campaign and find out which was the most cost-effective marketing method
• Lifetime value: This tells you how much revenue you can expect from a customer during their lifetime. The longer a customer makes purchases from your company, the higher their lifetime value 
• ROI: As with email marketing, ROI is incredibly important in analysing the effectiveness of a direct mail marketing campaign. To calculate your ROI, take your revenue and subtract the total cost of your campaign. Then, divide that number by the campaign cost

3. Produce key take-outs

Once you’ve analysed all of this data, you should produce a report that contains the key highlights in the form of a take-out that can inform key stakeholders and non-digital specialists. For example:

• Did longer or shorter content perform better?
• Did desktop, mobile, or tablet have the highest completion rate?
• Which channel provided the highest (and lowest) ROI?
• Was content customisation effective?
• Who are the top customers / prospects? 
• On which channels can they be reached?

4. Recommendations for next steps

Finally, once you’ve gathered all of your campaign data, analysed it, and produced key take-outs, you need to create a series of recommendations for next steps. These steps will help inform your future campaign efforts and will help you make incremental improvements each time you launch a campaign.

At this stage, you need to remember that learnings come from failure as well as achievements. Ensuring that you do not repeat mistakes is just as valuable as repeating successful tactics.

The risk of producing imprecise marketing campaign data analysis and actions

Every business in the world has access to thousands of data points that could inform their marketing campaigns. However, few businesses leverage this data effectively.

Although analysing the data your business has available is admirable, it’s also important to remember that analysing your marketing campaign data incorrectly can lead to poor decision making and potentially costly results. As a result, when analysing the data you’ve gathered, ensure that you avoid the following eight pitfalls, which can lead to imprecise, incorrect, or damaging results:

1. Not looking at a statistically significant timeframe
2. Not accounting for seasonality or industry-wide trends
3. Ignoring the impact of any offline marketing activities (or even other campaigns)
4. Not accounting for cross-channel and multi-channel engagement
5. Reporting on numbers without providing conclusions
6. Not focusing on the KPIs you set originally
7. Making decisions based on faulty data
8. Poorly visualising data

Once you’ve considered these eight common mistakes, it’s time to re-analyse the way your business analyses its data. In doing so, make sure that the data you’re looking at is significant and provides enough context. If you’re aware of the pitfalls, you’ll be better able to analyse results and create accurate conclusions that provide genuine insights for future campaigns.

How to turn your campaign data into impactful insights

By accurately analysing the marketing campaign data your business has at its disposal, you’ll be able to generate impactful insights that will guide future campaigns. In the process, you’ll improve campaign efficiency and generate greater ROI.

If you want to make informed decisions, then our software can help take your analysis to a more advanced level than traditional marketing analysis software.

With the help of our products, you can use graphics, diagrams, graphs, and maps to capture quantities and distributions at a glance, before quickly deriving correlations.

In addition to this, you can also access all your connected data sources to make smarter, data-informed decisions from a single view of your first-party data. We understand that your data tells a story, which is why we make it easy for you to share insights and campaign reports with all relevant stakeholders in a simple and visual format.

Thanks to formidable analytics capabilities, you can explore your data, create dashboards containing key insights, and design beautiful, branded templates. Visualisations are updated automatically to reflect the latest data refresh, so your teams can always work with up-to-date information.

Finally, our software can help you better understand your audience so that you can create more targeted and effective campaigns. You can use data exploration and visualisation tools to convert large volumes of transactional, multi-channel data to identify your ideal audience, and create targeted customer segments.

To discover more about how our marketing campaign data analysis tools can help your business, book a demo today. Alternatively, test drive the Apteco Orbit™ platform yourself and experience the power.