Ingenious Technologies

With the influx of new advertising channels and partners, marketing managers have a myriad of opportunities to reach their customers today. That also means they are frequently confronted with the following question: how effective was my campaign in bringing sales?

The challenge of marketers today is a seemingly simple question, but it has many layers to it. In this article, we find out what should be considered in the evaluation of a campaign’s performance and how the Ingenious Partner Management Platform (PMP) helps with this.

Evaluating the effectiveness of your marketing activities

1. Did I choose the right setup for my campaign?

Let’s start from the beginning. As simple as it might seem, just like in any project, the first steps are very important in the success of a campaign. You should make sure that you have chosen the correct and relevant campaign settings.

First the tracking: you are going to invest time and money into a campaign. Therefore it only makes sense to make sure that your tracking of your campaign’s performance is accurate. Choose a platform which offers you first-party tracking to avoid losses associated with third-party tracking.

Second, make sure that you choose the right audience. The more information you have about the offer you promote, the better you can assess the right target audience. Don’t hesitate to A/B test with diverse audience.

Finally, a good way to transform a poorly performing campaign into a well-performing one is by adjusting the setting (date and hours) to run your campaign during hours that make sense for your audience.

You can assess if your setup was correct by checking your ad serving platform statistics.

2. What are the results of my campaign?

Now that you have set up your campaign, and let it run for a while, you want to know how it performed. You can check your campaign statistics, with a particular close eye on your click-through rate and conversion rate. Often, in most ad serving platforms, click-through rates are presented to show that viewers of the ad interacted with the ad. For some platforms, it even shows you the conversion rate of whether Campaign X brought any sales or conversion.

However, the problem with most ad serving platforms is that the data shows only a half-truth, as it only shows clicks on the ad that led directly to a sale. What you don’t get is whether a click on the banner led to the website brought a sale later in the customer journey. That leads us to the next question.

3. How much sales did my campaign really bring?

Two major KPIs of a campaign, as we saw earlier, are the click-through rate and the conversion rate. Nevertheless, views and clicks which didn’t directly lead to a conversion in a campaign, are not worthless – they can bring you conversions later on.

However, in order to analyse this, you need to be able to map and analyse your customer journey. This is sadly underestimated, because most ad serving platforms and other marketing technologies do not show full customer journeys. By checking whether Campaign X appears in any customer journey, you would be able to understand the synergy Campaign X has with the other campaigns you have running. Perhaps this campaign appears mostly at the beginning of your customer journey, perhaps mostly at the end. Perhaps it doesn’t even appear at all, even though there were many clicks on your ad serving platform!

Customer Journey Patterns on Ingenious Partner Management Platform

The Ingenious PMP displays individual customer journeys for marketers to investigate, but it also goes a step further by aggregating them into grouped patterns. This enables marketers to filter the relevant channels and partners to study, view the results relevant to this, and analyse the best combination for the highest order value or number of conversions.

With the help of Ingenious PMP, you will be able to analyse full customer journeys in order to evaluate the true effectiveness of your campaigns!

To learn more, simply click on the image below to download the infographic now!