Is measurement a scary word for you? Well it shouldn’t be. Ahead of the ‘Measuring Success: The Why & The How’ workshop at DMX Dublin with Jennifer Hyland, Director of the Digital Team in Dublin, and Simon Quinton Vice President and Damian Low, Senior Research Manager of Edelman Intelligence, here are some useful free measurement tools.
As marketing continuously evolves, so too does the need for more sophisticated measurement solutions – a holistic approach that covers everything from digital, earned and paid. Companies now have the ability to know more about their stakeholders and customers than ever before, but gaining visibility of this knowledge isn’t always easy, however creating a robust measurement strategy and framework does offer one solution.
When looking at digital activity specifically, the best way to understand if your content and creative are landing well with your target audience in a relevant way is to accurately track the data, such as reach, engagement, CTR and to test the content, no matter your budget. There are hundreds of tools out there that collect, track and synthesise data. Even better is the fact that lots of them are free! We need to think about which ones are going to best help us get the data and insights we need, but also, what access we have to them, how do they integrate, if at all, and how will we collect that data?
The focus of measurement is often purposefully placed on tracking performance. Targets and Benchmarks can be developed, where applicable, using data from all available channels and outputs we have access too, be it owned channel data from platforms, sales data, web traffic, earned media and social from listening tools, the list goes on! Let’s start with the native tools available.
Native Tools:
The great news is that almost all social platforms have their own in-platform measurement tools. Whether it’s reach, frequency, CTR or lead generation that you want to track, these tools are easy to navigate, and consistent. These tools include;
Facebook Insights and Ads Manager
Twitter Analytics
LinkedIn Campaign Insights
Google Analytics
Google Keyword Planner
Google Trends
Not enough data for you? Well, let’s take a look at what else we have at our disposal. We’ve listed some of our favourite free tools below.
To make the most of the free tools available, find out what the goal of your campaign is and find a tool that reports on that aspect in as much detail as possible.
Here are just a few useful and free tools for measurement;
Talkwalker – this platform allows you to track sentiment, levels of social mention, engagement and reach. Within this, you can view results for the last 7 days or drill down to the last hour or even minute, to allow you to measure success throughout your campaign. This is really useful when working on reactive campaigns or new content styles, to allow you to track success quickly and adjust as needs be.
Social Mention – this tool pulls user-generated content from more than 100 platforms, simply based on keyword searches, meaning you can track social conversations quickly. Based on that content, Social Mention tracks traditional metrics along with unique ones, including user sentiment. Again, this is very useful to understand how creative is landing with your audience and overall sentiment and mood towards your messaging.
Similar Web – allows you to benchmark your website against any competitor in the world to see how well you are really doing in terms of overall visits, time on site, bounce rate and page views per visit. While Google Analytics can drill down in to your own site, it’s useful to have an understanding of competitor’s sites and to see potential improvements for your own site.
KeyHole – the real-time dashboard allows you to track any hashtags, and shows how many people posted using your hashtag, along with the number of Retweets, Likes and Impressions your campaign is generating, including multiple hashtags at once, to avoid back and forth between searches on Twitter.
Nibbler – provides a “test score” of any website on a scale of 1 to 10 for accessibility, SEO, social media, and technology. This is a quick and simple way to review sites and can help you analyse competitor websites as well as your own and help you to understand where your site is strongest and improve the journey for consumers.
Follower Wonk – analyses a Twitter account’s followers and tweets and allows you to figure out most-used hashtags for an account as well as optimal times for tweeting. This allows you to streamline posting times and use Twitter more effectively overall. You can also research your competitors since Followerwonk is not limited to providing data for a single Twitter account.
Overall, measurement is integral to showing real success in marketing solutions and tracking the impact of everything we do. The conversations need to happen as early as possible with all involved signing up to what success looks like.
If you’re heading to DMX and want to know more about ‘The Why & The How’ of measuring success, make sure you get to our workshop at 2.30pm in the orange stream, you can still get tickets here.