Planning for, creating and delivering a digital campaign is a challenging but extremely rewarding process, especially once the campaign goes live. However, every digital campaign must at some point come to an end and there is always one final step in the process: the post-campaign analysis (PCA).
If it’s the first time you’ve ever had to analyse a campaign, or you’ve done a few but are confused with how to make sense of the numbers, it isn’t that difficult if you know what you’re looking for. Here are the things you should be scanning for on your post-campaign analysis dashboard.
KPI’s.
Being crystal clear about what the brand was ultimately looking to achieve with the campaign will enable those involved in the PCA to associate the results with desired outcomes and make better sense of the data.
Rather than waiting for a big reveal, it’s also advisable to include an executive summary at an early stage in the report to indicate whether the campaign successfully met the objectives it set out to achieve. Whether this is ultimately good news or not, it helps prime the audience for the right discussions throughout.
Think of your goal, and centre your questions around that. What was your campaign for? What Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) should you pay the most attention to, and what’s the overall aim of your campaign? What kind of results would you be very happy with, and what kind of results would you settle with? It’s always good to have a satisfactory benchmark and an exceptional benchmark.
Budget returns.
Whether or not your campaign provides a return on your investment (ROI) really depends on how you’re measuring this conversion. Some campaigns will be a lead-in to a sales cycles that are very long (six weeks or more), and some campaigns will be just about driving awareness in your target customers minds’ (not specifically expecting them to purchase from you then and there).
Awareness metrics are very hard to measure, given they don’t provide a tangible fiscal ROI then and there, but they can often be proven down-the-track providing you ask your customers where and how they found you, and include ‘banner ads’ or ‘display ads’ in that option drop-down.
Remember that the Cointraffic team can advise you on how to spread the campaign’s budget optimally. If you have an aim simply to test our platform, then your budget could be in the range of €500–3K. But if you have a clear goal to obtain results, then you should consider a €5K marketing investment.
CPM.
Your cost-per-mille (CPM) is one of your most telling metrics because it’s centred around volume — so you should be leveraging it in your analytics as much as possible.
Whilst not every single one of those per thousand eyeballs will click on or generate a sale for you, it’s a really good indication that people now understand your brand, and would recognise you again if they saw another ad — or were at a point where they needed to buy what you were selling.
You can set the price below another competitor price if a certain duration and exact daily volume of impressions is not important to you — but if you want to be more confident in the amount of traffic received, we recommend setting the CPM price above the average.
If the countries inside the system have higher demand, then we recommend setting a higher CPM (note, you can change this depending on the demand). The real goal is finding the sweet spot of paying a fair price for the number of people who will see what you have to say.
Creative performance.
Your website or campaign landing page is likely to be the hub or centre-point of the campaign, bringing together all of your creative unique service propositions and design assets for prospects and customers. Having a specific page to direct customers to is recommended, as it allows you to be more targeted around campaign messaging; but to even get them there, you’ll need to do that for the creatives on the ad.
You want to drive action and engagement, and measure it with the number of clicks, where people lingered on the ad, and what their feedback was once they became a customer. Did they find your messaging clear and succinct? Was it easy-to-understand, sum up your brand well and did they feel that it was compelling?
Your content and your visuals should be compelling and simple, with a clear message. We recommend refreshing them from time to time, and if you need any help, have a chat with us about our HTML5 banners and creatives.
CTR.
Your click-through rate (CTR) gauges how well your keywords and ads are performing by how many visitors actually click on the ads.
Each ad format has its own click-through rate. Mobile formats traditionally have higher CTR, but mobile formats can have more miss-clicks than desktop, so it’s not always a sound comparison. Ideally, you’ll be testing on both mobile and desktop platforms for an accurate point of reference.
The quality of creative has a direct correlation on the CTR rate, which is why we recommend measuring the effectiveness of your creative and where you can do better. A great way to measure this by utilising a few different creative variations and testing which one does the best. The list of websites from where the traffic is coming from also can be directly linked to CTR, and for those that are underperforming, we give you an opportunity to switch them off (which you can do from your dashboard if need be).
Ultimately, you want to understand how many people “showed” interest in your campaign by clicking through. Once they’re through to your website and landing pages, they’ve essentially completed the first major stage of the funnel and what you do with them next is up to you.
GEO.
Different countries have different conversion rates, and to see the most accurate results, you can analyse the traffic by country-base through your Google Analytics dashboard, or other Demand Side Platform (DSP). Based on that result, you can optimise your campaign in Cointraffic accordingly.
Other metrics you’ll want to be taking note of are:
Quality score — the quality and relevance of your paid search landing page;
Impressions — the number of times your ads are being viewed by searchers;
Average position — determines how your ad typically ranks versus other ads;
Conversion rate — how many people who click on your ad go through to perform the desired action on your site.
Total traffic — macro view of how the campaign has driven traffic to the site;
Traffic by channel — traffic to the site segmented by main campaign channels;
Bounce rate — the percentage of visitors who leave before performing the desired action;
Conversions — a quantifiable measure of how visitors have performed the desired action;
Data capture — the quality of data obtained from visitors arriving at your site.
If you’re creating a PCA, we’d also advise that you arrange a meeting to discuss the outputs of the report so that you can share ideas and brainstorm ways you might improve for your next campaign.