Measuring Your Success During the Season of Selling

Happy New Year! Before you even begin reading this, take a moment to pat yourself on the back. Black Friday. Cyber Monday. Boxing Day. You managed to make it through the busiest online shopping year to date. Well done.

Now it’s time to dive into the data and measure marketing success. Measuring the analytics from the holiday shopping season is how you figure out where your profits stand. Furthermore, you’ll learn what worked and what didn’t, so you can optimize your marketing for next year.

This may seem overwhelming, but fear not. We’re going to explain what data you should be looking for, how to analyze it, and how to use it for more success in future years.

Last Year’s Data is Next Year’s Success

The only analytics you should be comparing yourself to in order to measure marketing success are your own analytics from previous years. If 2020 was your first year selling online, don’t skip this section. There’s plenty to learn that you can keep in the back of your mind for next year.

Some questions to ask yourself about previous year’s analytics are:

1. How much revenue do you attribute to email marketing? This is a metric you should be keeping track of. If you don’t have it, use this year to set a benchmark for your business.

2. Which emails drove results? This will help you focus on which emails to use in the future. Questions you should be asking yourself are:

• Which emails generated the highest click-through rates?

• What subject lines generated the highest open rate?

• Which days were the highest performing?

• What emails generated the lowest conversion?

• Which targeted contact lists performed best?

• What is your email marketing goal for next year? (Take note of your email marketing growth from year to year and set a goal to improve it for next year).

Measure Marketing Success with KPIs that Work:

KPIs, or Key Performance Indicators, are measurable values that demonstrate how effectively your company is achieving its key business objectives. You should be using KPIs at multiple levels to evaluate the success of reaching your goals.

We’ve narrowed down the top 4 KPIs you should be focused on to measure marketing success after the holiday season.

• Site traffic. This measures the overall visits and how people got to your site. There are a few different ways of measuring site traffic that you should consider.

• Direct traffic: When someone types your site directly into the URL bar.

• Search traffic: When someone finds your site organically on a search engine.

• Paid traffic: When someone clicks on your paid advertisement on a search engine.

• Display ad traffic: When someone clicks on your display ads.

• Email traffic: When someone follows a link from your email marketing.

• Social media traffic: When someone finds you through social media, organic, or paid.

• Referral traffic: When someone followed a link from a website that wasn’t yours.

• Conversion rate. This describes how many sales you’ve made relative to the number of visitors on your site. A high conversion rate generally means that you’re attracting high-quality traffic and engaging them in what you need to in order to make a sale.

If your conversion rate is not as high as you’d like, focus on improving your site content, creating a more user friendly web-design, and personalizing messages for your shoppers.

• Average order volume. The average size of your transactions is probably the KPI that is most closely tied to your profits. When customers spend more, you’ll increase your bottom line. To increase average order size you can try strategies like offering free shipping only after customers spend a certain amount of money.

• Cost per acquisition. Or CPA is designed to tell you how much it cost you on average to get a customer to make a purchase. Measuring this will help you determine the most efficient way to spend your marketing budget and maximize your return on investment.

Tracking Social

If your KPI analysis is telling you that social media is where you should be spending your marketing budget, it will be important to measure those ads accurately.

Facebook for Business, Twitter for Business, and LinkedIn Business Solutions are the best tools to run and measure your social media marketing presence.

When it comes to tracking display, paid, and organic traffic, Google Analytics is your best bet. </span

Where to Store All Your Data:

Google Drive, or desktop folders are where you need to be storing your data. Make a folder for each holiday that you wish to keep tabs on. For example, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Boxing Day, Valentine’s Day etc. 

It’s super important that you jot down your takeaways ASAP after these holidays. Write down some notes about what worked and what didn’t while they’re still fresh in your mind. This will help you set goals for next year and have tangible numbers that you can aim to hit. 

Measuring data helps you see where you went wrong and improve in future years. You’ll get a better understanding of consumer behaviour when you analyze the data and you’ll eventually notice an improvement on your marketing instincts.

By measuring the KPIs we’ve mentioned above, you’ll secure yourself some extremely useful data that will provide great insights for years to come. 

As always, please reach out to us with any questions or feel free to check out any of our marketing tip videos, such as the one below highlighting how to add gift cards as a product on your website!