Measuring Marketing Effectiveness in 9 Easy Steps
Measuring marketing effectiveness can make or break the marketing program at your organization. Ideas for your next promotion or marketing campaign can come from anyone in the company, but if you’re not accurately attributing success across the different channels you’re active on, how will you know where to optimize and which elements are working well?
Marketing teams, especially in startups, often have to resecure budget each quarter which makes marketing measurement a top priority before scaling inbound marketing efforts. So, how do you measure marketing performance, even if you’re on a budget?
How to Measure Marketing Effectiveness on a Budget
Many larger organizations will be quick to adopt expensive marketing measurement tools, but there are plenty of free options that you can (and should) consider.
In this post, we’re going to walk you through how to set up a marketing measurement framework with free and budget-friendly tools to help your startup measure marketing effectiveness on key metrics you’re concerned with across the channels you’re active on.
1. Setup Your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Platform
If you’ve already done this, skip to the next step. We like to use HubSpot as it’s easy to get started, syncs with all your favorite tools, and offers form and landing page builder functions. You can also edit, segment and email new leads directly from your contact list, along with a host of workflow automation tools that can simplify the sales process.
Starting with this step is crucial, especially for B2B marketing measurement. Conversions on your free trial, whitepaper, and contact forms are often one of the most important metrics to track for a marketing team, but if you’re not enabling your sales team to follow up on those leads and using the customer data for remarketing campaigns, the closing of a sale is unlikely. Plus, you’ll need a good CRM to measure marketing attribution of which campaigns brought in the best leads.
2. Create Landing Pages with Forms
If you’re subscribed to a certain level of CRM tier that enables you to create and customize forms and embed them on your website, you should take advantage of that opportunity. Otherwise, you’ll need to find a good form plugin for your WordPress site.
After developing a form with all the fields that capture the necessary customer information you’ll need for outreach, it is important to add hidden fields to your form. Hidden fields enable data unseen by the user to be passed through to your CRM after submission. To ensure accurate marketing measurement and optimization of your campaigns, you’ll want to add a field for each UTM parameter you plan to track, with an empty value. When the form is submitted, data from the URL will be passed through to your website and CRM, giving your organization important details about the source of this new lead.
Now, you’ll need a landing page to embed the form on. Writing and optimizing a landing page is art and a science, one that you may want to consider outsourcing keyword research services for. In general, keep it short and sweet but fully optimized around the keyword profile you’re aiming to rank for.
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3. Install Google Tag Manager (GTM)
By adding this tool to your website, you can easily integrate social media pixels to the site, track behavioral events and conversions, and collect analytical data without the need to manually update code. This should serve as your central source of truth for conversion configurations. If you have a WordPress site, follow this guide to get started.
4. Setup Google Analytics 4 (GA4)
You can do this by first creating an account, then by creating a tag in GTM for GA4. Find your Measurement ID for GA4 under Property > Data Streams, then use the built-in tag template in GTM, “Google Analytics: GA4 Configuration”, with the trigger “Page View – All Pages”. This will enable you to track events and traffic on your site from various marketing channels.
5. Setup Conversion Events in GA4
You’ll use GTM again for this, by creating a “Google Analytics: GA4 Event” tag for each conversion action on your site. Now, you can create an event for any action a user might take on your website. However, marketers should start with conversion events that resemble bottom-of-funnel actions such as a whitepaper download, free trial signup, or any other form fill where you are acquiring a user’s personal information.
To do this, you’ll need to identify a trigger action that occurs when the conversion is complete. It is easiest to configure your site so that a Thank You page is triggered upon any form fill – in which case the tag’s trigger would be a page view of the Thank You page. Here’s an example of a Google Tag Manager tag setup for the Contact Us goal completion on our site:
If you don’t have a Thank You page for each desired goal completion you want to track, you’ll need to find a variable that changes on the final click a user makes to convert. For example, you might be able to use Preview and Debug Mode of Google Tag Manager to find a variable occurring when the user clicks the form’s ‘Submit’ button. Then, you can create a “Click – All Elements” trigger type that fires when a click contains a ‘Click Text’ (the variable) of “Submit”. Here’s what that looks like in GTM:
Once the tags have been published in GTM, you should see them in your GA4 event report. Simply navigate to Configure > Events, find each event name (you may have to perform a test conversion for it to show up) and mark it as a conversion.
6. Setup Google Ads and Social Networks
You’re past the hard part. Now that you’re able to track the behaviors and characteristics of organic, direct and referral traffic to your site with Google Analytics, you’ll need to create a few more tags to track marketing campaign measurement from your paid media traffic.
For each platform, you’ll need to set up a GTM tag so that these ad networks can communicate with your website. This will enable you to create remarketing audiences for use in advertising, conversion actions to streamline reporting, and other helpful features. Here are some resources if you need assistance setting up these tags:
- Google Ads Conversion Tag
- Google Ads Remarketing Tag
- Twitter Pixel
- LinkedIn Insight Tag
- Reddit Pixel
- Meta Pixel
Once these tags are published, we recommend creating your conversion actions within Google Tag Manager to be sent to the ad networks for measurement, instead of recreating these actions within each platform. This should be easy now that you’ve already identified triggers for each goal completion you want to track.
These conversions can be used not only for specific marketing campaign attribution, but also to help each ad platform’s algorithm optimize your ad placements with data from previous converters.
7. Create UTM Links for All Campaigns
When pushing live a new advertising campaign, make sure you put UTM parameters into the final URL of each ad you create. This will help you attribute leads to specific marketing sources, campaign names and other key information within your CRM and Google Analytics property. Here’s a helpful Google tool that simplifies the UTM creation process.
8. Test Your Conversion Configuration
Now that you’ve got a set of conversions within your analytics and advertising tools to measure marketing performance, let’s test the tracking and attribution as if a real user were taking an action on your website.
- Create a test UTM link leading to one of your landing pages, like this one https://starkvisibility.com/resources/seo-copywriting-101-ebook/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=inbound-marketing-test-campaign
- Visit the link on an incognito browser, and on another browser, open the Realtime Overview report in Google Analytics
- Fill out the form on your landing page, and then head to the Engagement > Conversions report in GA4 (filter the date for just today) to see what source, medium and campaign are attributed to the recent conversion
- Head to your CRM and find the new contact that was created from your form fill. Are the UTM parameters of your test campaign detailed in the contact?
9. Setup a Dashboard to Monitor Your Success
Google Data Studio (now called Looker Studio) is one of the best free digital marketing measurement tools an organization can have. It enables you to sync various data sources from Google Analytics, Google Ads, Social Media platforms, CRMs, spreadsheets and more onto an integrated data visualization dashboard for seamless reporting and attribution.
We suggest setting up each page to display key performance indicators for the different channels your organization is active on (SEO, Google Ads, LinkedIn, etc). You’ll want to know the overall impressions, clicks and conversions (among other metrics) for each channel, but you’ll also benefit from including the performance of each specific campaign running on that platform (including budgets), so you can gain insights on where to optimize.
Refining Your Marketing Measurement Strategy
Now that you’ve set up a marketing measurement framework that’s going to enable accurate reporting and attribution moving forward, you can begin to think about which marketing metrics to track, what ROI objectives you’re looking to achieve, and what your upcoming forecasts may look like. You can also go ahead and launch your first advertising campaigns and begin scaling your omnichannel marketing strategy.
Keep in mind that you may need to create new conversions with the previously configured tools whenever you launch a new landing page or form that will be collecting customer information.
You’ll also want to double check your tags when URLs are changed or new ad platforms are set up. You’ll soon realize the benefits of measuring digital marketing once you can identify trends and wins across different marketing activities on a visual dashboard that looks great to both clients and organization leaders.
Learn more about creating a winning B2B startup marketing strategy.
Measure Marketing Success with Stark Visibility
Learning how to measure marketing success is a critical first step of any marketing team. As a B2B digital marketing agency, we’ve encountered many mid-stage startups who have somewhat of a grasp on marketing attribution, but have yet to configure a reliable approach to measuring marketing effectiveness.
The devil is in the details, but it will surely pay off to get a second set of eyes on your marketing measurement strategy so that you don’t end up changing your campaign structure or keyword mapping strategy according to misleading data.
Have more questions about setting up your marketing measurement framework? Contact us and we’ll be happy to discuss any challenges you may be running into.