Whisper it quietly; but firms in the UK may well have a problem with their digital marketing methods.

After all, whilst digital channels accounted for a staggering 66.4% of the total ad spend in the UK at the beginning of 2019, a worrying 39% of companies are struggling to measure their online marketing activities and measure the precise return on their investment.

In this post, we’ll ask why you should be measuring your digital marketing output, while also considering the tools that help you to achieve this objective.

Understanding the Importance of Measuring your Digital Marketing Efforts

Most importantly, measuring your digital marketing efforts and the results of individual campaigns enables you to monitor trends as they develop over time.

By focusing on the overall performance of your campaigns on a month-to-month, quarter-to-quarter and annual basis, you’ll also be able to identify short, medium and long-term trends that can improve the quality of your decision making going forward.

This definitely translates into a superior digital marketing spend ROI, as you learn from both failed and successful measures and adjust the nature of your spending accordingly.

Another key benefit of measuring your digital marketing efforts is that it enables you to deliver a better experience to your loyal customers.

More specifically, digital marketing measurement provides a unique opportunity to understand your customers in greater detail, particularly in terms of how they interact with your brand. As a result, you can determine the best digital channels for engaging your customers and optimise the impact of assisted conversions through their journey with the brand.

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How Should you Measure your Digital Marketing Efforts?

Now that you understand the benefits of measuring your digital marketing efforts, the next step is to identify the best ways in which to track performance.

The best tool is arguably Google Analytics, which enables you to leverage the brand’s vast database to effectively target customers and measure the impact of your campaign on key demographics.

This tool is particularly popular amongst experienced brands and marketers, as establishing a Google Analytics account requires a manual setup and asks holders to input some initial data.

For beginners, Facebook Insights has become a genuinely popular alternative, as this is completely automated in the background and measures key metrics such as total likes, net likes (of a target page) and the reach of your message.

If more of your business is generated through phone calls rather than website enquiries, however, you should also consider using call tracking software to measure the success of your digital marketing techniques.

The reason for this is simple; as it’s capable of linking telephone sales to your marketing activity and the precise digitals that were able to assist final conversions.