How to Prove the Effectiveness of Digital Marketing

Believe it or not, planning for next year is underway! Proving that your digital marketing efforts are working is a daunting task. You need to show the president of your company the results of your marketing efforts using hard facts & figures in a concise amount of time. In this blog, we’ll outline a few tips to get you started in the right direction.

Tracking Digital Marketing ROI

Before you can begin to put together a report proving the effectiveness of digital marketing efforts, you need to make sure that all the tracking is set up correctly. 

1. To start, if you don’t have Google Analytics and GA4 set up on your website, stop reading and go do that right now, then come back! Without this data, it is going to be extremely difficult to prove the effectiveness of digital marketing. Once set up correctly, allow data to pull in for about 90 days before you start putting together your findings.
2. Set up tracking for main conversion points on your website. This will help you correlate which channels are leading to different actions on your website.
   1. Contact Us / Request a Quote Forms
   2. Gated content forms
   3. User actions such as downloading a PDF or clicking a phone number.
3. Use UTM codes in your campaigns where applicable. If there is a very specific campaign you’re running, utilizing UTM codes may be helpful to track success in Google Analytics using the Source/Medium report.
4. List out large projects or campaigns you’ve worked on over the course of the year along with the metrics you’ll be using to determine success or failure.

Showing the Effectiveness of your Digital Marketing Efforts

Now before you start looking at all the data you collected, understand events and initiatives that happened throughout the year in your business and the industry as a whole. Remind yourself of what happened throughout the year. Did you have a month where you increased ad spend or pushed effort to a specific product? Maybe you had a major website hiccup or the industry has a slower season. Knowing this information will help pinpoint why the data is how it is at various points throughout the year. This will help you tell the full picture of your digital marketing performance.

Next, have your sales data available. If you’re able to match up leads to sales and correlate that back to dollars spent, you’ll be able to match up your ROI easily. This simple math equation is something your boss will want to see.

Use Google Data Studio to your advantage. Google Data Studio is a free tool that makes it easy to show data in a way that’s easy to understand. It’s also fully automated so once you set it up, it’s easy to update. Here are a few recommendations of what to include:

1. Traffic and leads by channel
2. Top landing pages for each channel
3. Line graphs to show progress over time

Here’s 1 example of a slide we use to show an overview of website performance:

Collecting data accurately is the most important step to putting together a report that correctly represents the effectiveness of digital marketing efforts for your business. Once you have that solidified, you can play around with the data to figure out the entire story of performance throughout the course of the year and prove your digital marketing ROI. Using that data, you can identify areas of improvement to adjust your strategy and win in 2023.

Happy reporting!