How to Track Digital Marketing ROI

Measure ROI Through Your Goals

The most important element of any marketing strategy is having a clearly defined goal. It’s impossible to track ROI unless you know what you want that return to be. For most campaigns, the goal is going to be landing conversions. For those not versed in marketing speak – a conversion is someone who took a desired action. For an e-commerce business, this is simple – they bought something you told them to. But for other businesses, a conversion could be a variety of things:

• A click to make a phone call
• Downloading an ebook
• Filling out a “contact us” form
• Completing a quote online

The list goes on and on. As a marketer and business owner, you need to decide what is most relevant for your business and what is most relevant for your campaign. If you’re still scratching your head, check out our blog post on how to create a successful inbound marketing campaign. Once you have your goal in place, you can attach an ROI to your efforts.

Example of How to Track Goals

Let’s use an example to illustrate how to track ROI:

Buzz Buzzerson owns a print shop. He knows through market research that his ideal customer is a “Print Project Manager” working at a multi-million dollar organization. Buzz knows that his ideal customer is usually a millennial who has been at their current job for less than a year and wants to be able to make bulk orders easily. Buzz also knows that the best way to reach this demographic is by positioning his company as a knowledgeable resource.

Buzz’s marketing team creates a “Print Buying from A-Z” ebook. For Buzz, a successful conversion is a download of the ebook. Buzz knows that if he can then create customers out of 4 of those who download the ebook, he’ll break even on the money spent toward marketing. Buzz sends follow-up emails to everyone who downloads the ebook. After a month or so of the campaign, Buzz knows that for every 10 downloads of the ebook, he sees two contacts that respond to his follow up email and are ripe potential customers.

Buzz can track his ROI by how many conversions he sees on the ebook and how many of those contacts become customers. For Buzz, he needs at least 5 new customers as a result of his marketing strategy for a positive ROI. Based on averages, Buzz will want to see at least 50 conversions (downloads of the ebook) for a positive ROI.

Buzz is just one example – now it’s time to create your own goals to track your own ROI.

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