Measuring your Marketing ROI
Here’s a list of tools that I've used for measuring Marketing ROI across projects.
1. Twitter Analytics (https://analytics.twitter.com/about)
Twitter Analytics is an all-in-one tool that lets you see how your followers react to the content you share. You can track your overall monthly performance, analyze each tweet separately, and get insight into your followers.
Getting a detailed analysis of each tweet. Go to the Tweets tab to learn about your top tweets, engagement rate, and overall impressions.
Audience insights. What interests your audience? What’s the education level of your followers? Are they primarily male or female? Do they like watching sports? Or maybe comedies?
Twitter breaks it down for you, and that’s hugely valuable.
2. Facebook Page Insights
(https://www.facebook.com/business/a/page/page-insights)
Since Facebook is the biggest social network, it becomes even more important to know what works for your audience and what doesn’t. Facebook Page Insights is a place where you can track how successful your campaign is and study your followers’ behavior.
Use it for:
- Measuring exposure and social engagement. The Likes, Reach, Page Visits, and Tab Visits panes will give you detailed information on the views, comments, and shares your posts gather. You’ll also see how many paid and organic likes you’ve received, which posts made people unlike your page, and where your fans are coming from (e.g., your website, Google, or other websites that linked to you).
- Understanding your fans. Facebook Page Insights will tell you when your followers are the most active (so you can post at the right time), who views your posts (men or women, older or younger), where they live, and which buttons they click more eagerly than others.
- Be sure to check the Actions on Page and People tabs.
3. YouTube Analytics (https://www.youtube.com/analytics)
YouTube’s analytics tool can answer all your questions
Do your viewers enjoy every minute of your video or do they click away after the first five seconds?
Does your target audience even know about your channel?
Measuring exposure and engagement: Audience Retention, Engagement Reports, and Playback Locations will tell you all about how viewers receive your video content. Not only will you learn how many people clicked the play button, but also how many watched till the very end, commented, or shared your videos across other channels.
Measuring time on page: The Watch Time tab shows you how long your viewers spend on your page actually watching your videos. Apart from that, you’ll learn at which minute they click away and what brought them to your channel (suggested videos, Google, or other sources).
4. Hootsuite (https://www.hootsuite.com/)
Hootsuite is Twitter, YouTube, Facebook Page, LinkedIn, and Instagram analytics combined in one application. It’s a perfect solution for those who find it rather inconvenient to check five different statistics tools to get an insight into what’s going on.
Use it for
Measuring social engagement: You’ll learn all about views, likes, shares, comments, retweets, and new followers. Hootsuite allows you to track social engagement real-time.
Tracking brand mentions: Just one click and you’ll get a nice graph displaying all the mentions of your brand within a given period of time. Manage your business connections and see how talked-about your brand is.
5. HubSpot (https://www.hubspot.com/)
HubSpot is a complex solution for online marketers that can do much more than provide analytics. It helps generate leads, increase sales, automate marketing, manage customers, and more.
Use it for:
Tracking SEO. - HubSpot Marketing Analytics can identify blog articles, landing pages, emails, and social media posts that perform well in terms of specific keywords. It also looks at backlinks, an important factor in your search engine optimization. In other words, every piece of content you publish can be analyzed and you’ll know exactly how it affected your search engine rankings.
Monitoring brand mentions. HubSpot’s Social Inbox is a tool that allows monitoring of brand mentions as well as hashtag and keyword mentions. Apart from freeing you from the chore of gathering this information manually, the feature gives you total control over your social media monitoring.
Monitoring leads. Imagine that you have a full, detailed picture of your leads. You know where they come from, how they react to your content, which links they click and which they ignore.
6. Buzzsumo (https://www.buzzsumo.com/)
Primarily used for finding influencers, but you can also use take advantage of several features when measuring how well your own content performs.
You can use it for:
- Measuring engagement: You can enter your domain name and find your best-performing content within a given period of time. You won’t see a list of web pages that get the most traffic, but rather the ones with the most shares.
- Monitoring links: With the View Backlinks feature, you can check all the backlinks to a particular piece of content.
- Tracking mentions: With Buzzsumo you can track brand mentions not only on social media, but all across the web. You can set up alerts and get notified every time your name (or any competitor’s name) is mentioned on the internet
7. Google Analytics (https://analytics.google.com/)
Google Analytics is the most popular tool used by anybody who works with websites. It’s hard to find a service that can compete with Google Analytics in terms of price, data, and the number of features available.
You can use it for:
Measuring traffic. With Google Analytics, you’ll see daily visitor figures, your most popular pages, and where your traffic is coming from. This last feature is especially useful if you run email, guest post, or social media campaigns.
Bounce rate. This is a good indicator of how engaging your content is. Use this information to figure out which pieces of content aren’t engaging your audience, and then improve your efforts with that information.
Assess ROI statistics: how much each type of conversion is worth. The ability to assign values to specific conversions in Google Analytics is hugely useful.
8. Hotjar (https://www.hotjar.com/)
Hotjar is my personal favorite. It basically records users’ sessions on your website. You can sit back, and watch a video of your visitors moving cursors, tapping, clicking, and scrolling through your pages. Though it may feel like you’re spying on customers, Hotjar lets you step in your visitors’ shoes and notice malfunctions, technical errors, and usability slips in order to fix them.
Though it may feel like you’re spying on customers, Hotjar lets you step in your visitors’ shoes and notice malfunctions, technical errors, and usability slips in order to fix them.
- Tracking time on page: Watch recordings and see how much time users spend reading your blogs or landing pages.
- Measuring scroll depth: If your content is engaging, visitors will scroll to savor every word of it. Use Hotjar’s scroll heatmaps to identify your best- and worst-performing content.
- Tracking conversions: Do you know exactly when your potential customers leave? Which pages and steps make them click away and opt for your competitor? Identify those barriers with Hotjar reports and take actions to improve conversion.
9. Kissmetrics - https://www.kissmetrics.com
Kissmetrics can monitor your user’s behavior like Hotjar, generate leads like HubSpot, and track URLs like Google Analytics. What makes Kissmetrics special is its simplicity and focus on helping you build a unique product.
Measuring conversion. Kissmetrics will give insight into how your marketing efforts translate into revenue. Do emails attract the highest-paying customers, or do most of them come from Facebook? Knowing this will help you determine which channels to focus on.
10. SEMRush https://www.semrush.com/
SEMRush is one of the go-to tools for SEO specialists, and is trusted by millions of bloggers and digital marketers. Many uses it for spying on competitors and monitoring their best keywords, backlinks, and ad campaigns. But it also offers numerous possibilities for tracking your own progress.
9. SpyFu (https://www.spyfu.com/)
SpyFu is quite similar to SEMRush. Though it’s designed primarily for SEO specialists, anyone can use it to track their competitor’s keywords, backlinks, and ads, as well as see how well your own website performs.
Use it for:
Measuring keyword rankings. SpyFu gives you a full picture of which keywords are ranking well, which lost their positions, and which you should focus on.
Tracking backlinks. Again, you can see who is linking to you (which tells you the content that earns the most attention). Remember, backlinks are great for SEO, so this is a good metric to track.
10. Ahrefs (https://ahrefs.com/content-explorer)
Ahrefs can help you see how pages are performing against keyword rankings and backlinks, for both you and your competitors. Using Ahrefs’ content explorer, you can find new ideas based on the most shared and linked-to posts, rather than relying on your gut feeling.
Content Targeting: With filters and advanced searches, you can find content around a specific topic. You can then narrow down your search by criteria like publish date, shares and organic traffic.
Competitive Research: Look into competitors’ page performance, such as backlinks they earn, keywords they rank for and traffic they drive. You can also monitor their highs and lows over time.
Keyword Targeting: Track your rankings in organic search and compare them with competitors’ results. See where you lag behind when it comes to keywords so you can make improvements.
11. SEO SpyGlass (https://www.seo-spyglass.com/)
Tracking links: Since SEO SpyGlass is a backlink tracker, it gives you detailed information on your backlinks and their sources. You’ll know how valuable those links are, which ones drive the most traffic to your website, and even which ones harm your SEO and can lead to a ban from Google.
Tracking social shares: You can monitor the growth or decline of your social signals for every webpage separately. It’s an easy-to-use backlink tracker that many uses to keep an eye on competitors.
Use it for:
Tracking links: Since SEO SpyGlass is a backlink tracker, it gives you detailed information on your backlinks and their sources. You’ll know how valuable those links are, which ones drive the most traffic to your website, and even which ones harm your SEO and can lead to a ban from Google.
Tracking social shares: You can monitor the growth or decline of your social signals for every webpage separately.