Week 4: Analyzing Your Metric Performance (a 2-min briefing)

In our previous blog, I talked about setting up your digital campaign, what to look for and ask and most importantly analyzing your campaign in increments to make important adjustments. These adjustments could be minor, such as replacing a piece of content with another that has a stronger call to action or it could be as wide ranging as setting up further a/b testing to ensure you are reaching the audience that you intended to.

Here are some questions to ask when beginning to analyze your campaign:

1.    Are the channels we are using reaching the audience we intended on?

2.    How is our target audience engaging within the first touch of their journey?

3.    How many steps within our journey is the average person continuing on to?

4.    Is our content timely? Relative? Most importantly, consistent?

5.    Analyze your metrics:

a.    If your CTR is low but you have a high open%, why? What factors could be causing this, and how can we adjust? It may be that you have an engaging subject line in your email, and great content within that email as well, but you could be lacking a stronger call to action. Remember, a call to action should take your audience to the next step in their journey, not the final step.

b.    If your CTR is high, let’s say 10%, but your bounce rate is high as well, why? So you had a well-performing email send with a strong call to action that got your audience to engage with your message, but maybe the content on your landing page or direct URL isn’t TIMELY, RELEVANT, and CONSISTENT. Again, analyzing this from your audiences’ perspective is most important and in some cases it does take time to figure out your audience throughout yearly cycles. Your audience may react to a piece of content, let’s say a wine ad in December, better than they would reply to that same ad in June. Understanding the “WHY” behind audience behavior is critical to the success of your campaign.

This week’s blog was aimed at giving an idea of the kinds of questions to ask and how to look at your campaign in an analytical way. In all reality, very few digital campaigns are home runs, but these are too often the only ones we hear about. There is a lot to be learned from failed campaigns of the past, and we shouldn’t treat a failed campaign as though company “x” didn’t know what they were doing. We all remember Crystal Pepsi, right?

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