How To Measure Campaign Success The Right Way

Volume.

It’s how so much of life is measured. Pounds lost, time stuck in traffic, hours slept (or not), miles run, macros consumed… You get the idea.

When you get to the office, it’s the same story:
leads generated, bugs decoded, sales closed, etc.

Volume, apparently, is the measure of hard work. Could that be because it’s easy to measure?

“But the measure of working SMARTER is conversion rates.”

Rather than asking the volume question, “How much am I getting?” Why not ask a business growth question, “how are our conversions in our revenue roadmap increasing?

“When we chase volume, we can only increase the output by increasing the input. By focusing on the conversion rates of your marketing efforts, you are able to change the output with the same–or less–input.

It’s a small shift to think specifically about conversion rates instead of volume…but like a plane shifting course by just one or two degrees, this shift can bring you to a completely different destination. Which, can be a great outcome, right?

Before you think it, the answer is “no,” This is not a blog post about valuing quality over quantity (though this is a very valid effective marketing argument in this day and age of digital marketing). It’s about making smarter conversion rate decisions.

Why Marketers Default to Volume

If you recall this scene from Braveheart, you may start to see some similarities between the volume problem your business is facing, and the size of the rocks these two are throwing around. (Hint: The larger rock isn’t the one that matters.)

The psychology behind playing a volume game is that low conversion rates can be overcome by simply pushing more through. In the clip above, the solution then would have been to throw an even bigger rock (which would have required enormous effort, energy, and engineering) so that even if it’s inaccurate, it still hits its, well, “target.” But there’s a problem with always playing the volume game—you don’t have access to unlimited volume (especially with all the changes happening to this ad platform), even if you had all the resources in the world to buy all the ad space and talk to all the qualified prospects, all the time.

Campaign Success: Moving from Volume to Smarter Conversion Rates

Have you ever reported on a marketing campaign success with metrics like impressions and clicks to the site? How about when you report on the number of forms filled, or the number of emails opened? These are not bad metrics, but they are still volume metrics. These are bigger rocks instead of aimed, right-size rocks like click rates, visits to form fills, and how these rates during this campaign compare to past or concurrent campaigns. If that sounds obvious, can you recall right now what those conversion rates are? Can the other members of your team? When you run a campaign, who knows about it outside of your department? And here’s the really important question: which conversion rate is your campaign meant to impact?

Campaigns based on improving conversion rates, not volume, are the only way to drive more revenue when your costs are always going up and your budgets aren’t changing. When you find an acceptable conversion rate, then you can start playing the volume game because you know that your campaign is better prepared to get the most output from your hard-earned input.

Reverse Engineer Your Results 

Rogue works with Fortune 500 companies, growing startups, and everything in between. None of them have “extra money,” and neither do you. Even for those organization

s with budget to use for testing, those tests need to be scientific and yield specific learnings if not immediate improvements.

Enter: The revenue roadmap. The revenue roadmap is a simple exercise to help marketing and sales teams focus their budgets where they will have the most impact. Each conversion rate along the roadmap is tied to channels and tactics specific to your organization, so you know where to apply the revenue and what to measure when you do.(And if you want a methodical framework for refining the message you deliver in a channel in order to impact conversion rates, check out the buyer’s journey map.)

Learn More than You Expected

Campaigns kick out data, but data needs to be turned into insights.

Rogue’s Measurement Bundle is a collection of templates and tools to help you effectively measure your marketing campaigns and benchmark results.

Although the templates may be simple and straightforward, sometimes they can be easier said than done. And that’s where Rogue can help. If you’re ready to build a strategy that will help you move further, faster, this group of rogue marketers is always just a click away.