Your monitoring and optimisation guide

Digital marketing tools are essential for all businesses looking to promote or create awareness for their brand. These tools allow you to see what your customers are doing on your website and optimise your webpages for maximum sales conversion; however, such tools are only effective if you know how to use them correctly. Many businesses fail to carry out an effective digital marketing campaign because their monitoring falls short of delivering optimisation.

Know your objectives
Before you start, it is critical to know where you want to be. Consulting individuals at every level from management down will help you to get a clearer picture of your goals. When you start out on this objective-finding journey, the business objectives may still be very broad; therefore, you need to keep asking what each objective means. This may help to uncover management desires, such as having the audience view your brand as consistent or personal; likewise, it may show that this objective is a perceived standard that does not apply to your brand.

Set targets
Once you know your objectives, set your goals; with goals in place, you can create a road map towards achieving them. Are you looking to increase brand awareness or generate more leads or sales? Now you can establish measurable and reachable objectives along the way. Specific and measurable objectives help the whole team to stay focused and motivated by their activities. You will also want to establish realistic targets. Small wins along the way help to monitor and optimise efforts and pave the way to the overall goals.

Identify key performance indicators (KPI)
What are the digital media goals you wish to achieve? We call these goals ‘key performance indicators’ (KPI). Essentially, they tell us how a webpage is performing. A good search engine ranking is a KPI and can deliver traffic to your website, which may in turn generate leads and sales. A great digital marketing campaign should increase your ranking and this needs to be measured before and after the campaign to be verifiable. Increased visitor traffic is also a KPI and goes hand in hand with your improved ranking, but do not forget to also assess visitor engagement. Do visitors stay on your page and move through the site? Do they come back to your site more than once? This is a KPI that needs to be measured. It is an important sign of visitor engagement, with interested visitors having the potential to be converted into sales.

Make the conversion
Converting traffic into sales is the name of the game. If your KPIs are high but you are not converting, it could be a sign that the digital marketing activities are robust but your product or sales channels need to be reviewed. Again, taking a holistic approach is the best way to see results.