6 Best Tools for Measuring the Success of Your Digital Marketing Strategies

The best way to know whether you're hitting your digital marketing KPIs is to measure them, not once but regularly. One fantastic thing about digital marketing is that you can measure your success and real-time if you like. This allows you to know where most of your leads are coming from, how visitors behave when they visit your website, where you aren’t quite getting things right, and of course, what you must do to up your game.

Sounds pretty straightforward, right? Pretty much, it does, especially when you realize that you don't even need to put much effort into measuring your digital marketing success — there are tools for that. If you're looking to start measuring how successful your marketing strategies are, you are doing the right thing, and you should do it sooner.

Fortunately, there are several online tools available to business owners and digital marketing agencies today. Whether you're using PPC advertising, email marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), or content marketing, these tools are easy to use; they can provide you with lots of insightful data to help you make the most out of your online marketing strategies.

Importance of Defining Your Marketing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

This post focuses on the 6 best tools you can use to measure your digital marketing success. But before you begin to measure, keep in mind that you must have defined your KPIs. Unless you define your goals, it will be hard to measure your success in any endeavor. The same applies to marketing. Your KPIs could be the monthly return on investments (ROI), landing page conversion rate, website traffic, click-through rate (CTR) on PPC ads, average ranking on SERPs, inbound links acquired, blog posts visits, social media following, brand engagement, and visibility, email marketing performance, etc.

Often, business owners make the mistake of thinking that ROI is the only way to determine if digital marketing strategies are working, whereas measuring ROI is just one of many metrics or KPIs that tell you how successful your efforts are. When digital marketing is successful, it does not only translate to dollars and cents. If you manage to use content marketing to boost your average website traffic in a month or get your website appearing among the top 5 sites on SERPs, that is also success.

So, depending on your marketing KPIs, successful digital marketing can mean various things to different businesses. This explanation should give you a good idea about how important it is to define your KPIs. In fact, it further helps you understand which tool to use to measure your success. Now that we have this out of the way, let's move on to learning some recommended tools.

1. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is an incredible reporting tool that business owners and digital marketing agencies can use to measure all the essential metrics that tell you if your digital marketing campaign is gaining ground, static, or just losing steam. With Google Analytics, one can easily monitor and create insightful reports on metrics like pageviews, new site visitors, bounce rates, conversions, segmentation, etc.

Google Analytics is the most-used web analytics tool on the internet today. And guess what? It is straightforward to use. When running PPC ad campaigns, you can confidently rely on PPC for real-time reports on what your ad is performing. It has a paid version used for advanced monitoring and reporting, but the free version also shows you a lot of data at a glance. E-commerce companies will find this tool handy for measuring sales activity and performance.

2. HubSpot

Just like Google, HubSpot happens to be the favorite of many digital marketers. It is easy to use, highly resourceful and provides you an easy-to-understand step-by-step approach to running your digital marketing campaigns and tracking your progress on the go. HubSpot provides you with an all-encompassing package to monitor and report on inbound marketing and automation, especially with everything at a glance.

When you're specific on knowing how much traffic you're getting from certain keywords, HubSpot provides you with an SEO tool that shows your ranking, which is equally easy to use. Generally, HubSpot shows you how your online touchpoints, such as your website, landing pages, social media channels, and calls to action are doing — where the visitors come from, how you're doing compared to the competition, and many more, all at a glance.

3. Mixpanel

Not many tools can give you accurate data on how mobile users engage with your brand like Mixpanel does. While setting up your campaigns, you must also realize that more and more users are switching to mobile devices. This means that many users are using apps and mobile devices to access services and buy products online.

To understand how well users engage with your business on mobile devices and through apps, you can use Mixpanel. This tool shows you how much traffic is coming from mobile users, what they are looking for, and essentially every other metric that helps you monitor your online marketing strategy.

4. Hootsuite

When your measure of success is more focused on social media engagement and the performance of social media ads, then Hootsuite is the way to go. While several other tools offer you meaningful insights into the growth and performance of your business on social media, Hootsuite comes highly recommended. You can even sign in to all your social media channels (Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.) from a single interface to save yourself the trouble of trying to remember your passwords all the time.

With Hootsuite, you can monitor and measure important metrics like followers, engagement, clicks on links, mentions, impressions, click-through rate, and ROI of your social handles.

5. Salesforce

Salesforce places a strong emphasis on understanding your customers and optimizing their journey as they interact with your business. It is a popular customer relationship management (CRM) tool, and perhaps the world’s largest cloud platform, which helps you bring all of your customer information together in one place.

Using Salesforce allows both your marketing and sales teams to operate with the same objectives, the overall goal being to improve the experience of your customer as they interact with your brand online. Salesforce puts the activities of your marketing team side by side with your sales results. With the Wave Analytics feature on Salesforce, you can easily see the ROI of your marketing activities.

6. Basecamp

Basecamp is a project management tool that helps you ensure that your marketing plans and strategies are running as smoothly as planned. It provides you with a calendar, file sharing tool, and messaging tool. While this tool will not automatically get your project completed, it helps put you on track, especially with the to-do list feature.

If you are looking for a content management tool, Basecamp can be pretty handy, plus it incorporates a timely reminder that allows you to see activities that need your attention. Among all the tools listed so far, this one may not directly monitor and report on the success of your digital marketing plans. Still, it is essential to ensure your marketing plans are in motion and running as scheduled.

Choosing the Right Tool for Your Digital Marketing Campaigns

As you can see from the discussion above, some tools are specifically designed for some purposes. Still, tools like Google Analytics and Hubspot come top of the list because they provide an all-in-one insight into important metrics that will help you make smart marketing decisions.

If you intend to combine more than one of these tools, you can use another powerful tool called Megalytic to pull them all together in one place and avoid hopping from one to another. If in doubt or still unsure of what next steps to take, contact us today at The Mission.

As leading growth strategists, sales, and digital marketing experts, we are here to take through every step to creating smart digital marketing goals. We provide you with help on how to implement them successfully.

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