What Is Digital Marketing Success and How Do You Measure It?

A marketer’s role is to create, implement and optimize successful marketing campaigns. But what does success mean in digital marketing? Before you take the first steps toward creating a campaign, you need to know how to measure marketing success. Understanding what makes digital marketing efforts effective as a marketer will help you produce results for any brand in any industry, which can help you stand out.

In this guide, you’ll learn how to measure digital marketing success to create more effective campaigns.

First, define the goals for your campaign or strategy. Setting clear goals and objectives will help everyone understand the purpose of the campaign and what it will accomplish. These goals will guide your decision-making at every step of the digital marketing process, from choosing your digital channels to creating your marketing content. They will keep you and your team focused and on the same page.

The marketing goals you set should also align with the overall business strategy. For example, if the broader business strategy is to expand market share, you could set a marketing goal of boosting brand awareness. Higher brand awareness supports obtaining a wider market share. Then, you would measure digital marketing effectiveness with metrics quantifying brand awareness, like increased or new traffic to the company website or social media profile views and growth in new audience segments.

Though there are some intangible factors, digital marketing effectiveness can generally be measured with metrics. Common examples include:

• Conversion rate: The percentage of people who see your marketing materials and take a specified action (such as completing a purchase or sharing contact information).
• Click-through rate: The percentage of people who see your digital marketing materials and click on an included link. 
• Return on investment: The profit (or loss) driven by the amount you spend on a digital marketing campaign.

Tracking and analyzing metrics like these gives you concrete information about how well your campaigns are performing. These are your key performance indicators (KPIs). If you see that your campaign metrics are trending in a positive direction, that is a good sign that you are successfully executing your marketing strategies.

There are specific metrics to track for each digital marketing channel. For example, in email marketing, you may monitor the open rate, which is the percentage of email recipients who open your message. Successful email campaigns generally have higher open rates since more people are viewing and potentially interacting with your marketing message.

Also, consider audience engagement and retention metrics, such as:

• Social media interactions: The number of likes, comments, brand mentions and shares a brand gets on its social media pages.
• Bounce rate: The percentage of web visitors who click away after viewing only one page.
• Churn rate: The percentage of existing customers who stop using a brand’s products or services over a given period. 

Digital marketing campaigns often aim to boost audience engagement statistics to help reach broader goals, such as increasing sales.

Digital marketers use software tools to track and report their campaign metrics. Google Analytics, for example, is one of the top marketing tools for monitoring web traffic and analyzing user behavior.¹ With this free tool, you can view information such as:

• Sources of web traffic
• Number of page views
• Bounce rate
• User demographics
• Average time spent on the brand website

If you run search engine ads or other digital campaigns through Google Ads, you can access even more campaign data in Google Analytics.

There are also dashboards specific to the digital marketing channels you use. For example, Ads Manager is the platform for running ads across Meta social media sites, including Facebook and Instagram.²

You may find third-party platforms useful, too, though they typically charge a fee. Constant Contact and MailChimp are examples of email marketing tools, while Hootsuite and Buffer are two popular options for social media marketing.

Do not stress about creating the perfect digital marketing campaign on the first try. It is much more important to learn how to measure success and glean insights from your campaign data. From there, you should focus on optimizing your future campaigns to drive even stronger results.

One popular method for optimizing digital marketing is A/B testing. In these tests, you create two versions of an ad or marketing communication. Both versions are identical except for one element: the element you’re testing. For example, you might test two ads with the same design, just different text for the call-to-action. Then, you show these two versions to separate test audiences to see which gets a better response. Take insights from this testing to create more impactful, effective digital marketing campaigns.

Digital marketing also allows for personalization and targeted messaging, which can improve your campaign results. An example would be running a retargeting ad campaign that shows customers the products they added to their carts but didn’t purchase.

Compared to traditional marketing, digital marketing has the advantage of offering immense amounts of real-time data about your campaigns and customers. You can track how consumers interact with brand content across channels such as email, search and social media using multi-touch attribution models.

This data about how users behave and interact with the brand across channels will help you create the most effective marketing campaigns for your target audience.

Data alone is not enough to measure digital marketing campaign effectiveness. One of the most important digital skills for marketers is knowing how to convert that data into actionable insights that help you understand the previous campaign and create more effective campaigns going forward.

As you are examining the data, look for patterns and trends. What has changed over time? Are your key metrics rising or falling? Then, consider possible explanations for these trends. Instead of simply focusing on one metric at a time, focus on the whole picture of what these data sets are saying about your digital marketing campaign overall.

Digital marketers are sometimes also responsible for creating visual representations of these results to help stakeholders understand the underlying meanings behind data sets. Using visuals such as graphs and charts can make your marketing data easier to interpret and digest.

The digital marketing landscape is always evolving, so you need to be able to adapt. Even when you find strategies that work well for one audience or goal, they might not yield the same strong results indefinitely or in other campaigns.

Keep an eye on evolving market trends to see if consumer attitudes or marketing best practices are shifting. For example, short-form video has become a huge part of digital marketing in recent years.³ Marketers who notice trends like these and adopt them early are better equipped to create impactful digital campaigns.

Also, monitor feedback from your audiences. Often, audiences will directly state what they do and do not like about different marketing campaigns, and you can use that information to guide future campaign decisions. Social listening and feedback surveys are common methods to track how your audience feels about your campaign. Refining your digital marketing skills with further education in response to evolving trends, audience preferences and metric analysis is the best way to sustain long-term growth.

Digital marketing success is built through knowledge and skills pertaining to various marketing channels. Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications is here to teach you the skills you need to succeed as a marketer. While you’re learning from experts in the field of marketing in the Master of Science in Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) Professional program, you are also building a network of professional contacts who can help you take your career to the next level. There are multiple application deadlines to better accommodate your schedule.

Get started today and schedule a call with one of our admissions outreach advisors.