Evaluating your digital marketing strategy is a significant and often time-consuming undertaking. If you are considering an internal review, what are the benefits? By regularly assessing your organization’s digital marketing strategy, you can uncover what has been working, areas of improvement, and new opportunities that can significantly impact your business’s success in the short-term and long-term. Further, this review is a valuable way to stay ahead of your competitors in the ever-evolving digital marketing landscape.
In this guide, we will go through the process of assessing and optimizing your digital marketing efforts. This includes understanding your audience, evaluating your channels, measuring success, and refining your strategy.

Setting the Stage for Digital Marketing Evaluation

The initial steps in your evaluation involve two key elements: clarifying your business objectives and understanding your digital landscape.

Clarify Your Business Objectives

Aligning your organization’s digital marketing goals with your overall business strategy is critical to ensure you get the greatest return on investment for your marketing efforts. Your business goals will vary significantly depending on the products or services you provide and your target audience. Your digital marketing strategy should be tailored to these specific objectives.

Understand the Digital Landscape

It’s crucial to understand not only who your customers are but also where and how they interact with your business online. This is especially important when it comes to paid advertising channels. Platforms including Instagram, LinkedIn, and TikTok all cater towards different age demographics and audiences. Khoros published a Social Media Demographics Guide, which includes detailed demographic information on all of the major social media platforms along with this handy chart:

Using Retail as an example, we can see that the ideal paid advertising channels for this industry include Meta (Facebook and Instagram), Pinterest, and Snapchat. Elsewhere, Facebook, X (formerly known as Twitter), and LinkedIn are ideal for Financial Services organizations.

A reevaluation of your target audience and age demographic will help ground your decision-making on the best paid advertising platforms to utilize to promote your products and/or services.

Understanding Your Audience and Digital Presence

Once a customer has landed on your website through a search engine or from a paid ad, their experience on the site should be as user-friendly and straightforward as possible. This maximizes the likelihood that they will convert, for example, through a direct online purchase or a lead form submission.

Gaining insight into the specifics of the customer journey on your site can reveal insights into your strategy’s effectiveness and help you refine your audience. The customer journey encompasses the sequence of engagements your customer undergoes with your brand, product, or business from initial awareness of a problem to the purchase decision. In Hubspot’s extensive post on this subject, they outline the five phases of the customer journey (Awareness, Consideration, Decision, Retention, and Loyalty) along with recommendations on how to create your own customer journey map.

By charting out the buying process, identifying the emotions connected to the customer journey, and analyzing specific user actions, you and your marketing team will be able to unveil insights into your strategy’s effectiveness. Additionally, evaluating user research sources and exploring solutions to improve the buying process can help you further refine your audience.

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Evaluating Your Digital Marketing Channels

A comprehensive review of all of your digital marketing channels is essential to effectively evaluate your organization’s digital marketing strategy. The next sections below outline each of the core channels that you may be using to promote your products or services along with guidelines on how to measure their performance.

Website Analysis

There are a number of metrics that can be used to assess website performance that can be generally sorted into the following categories: traffic, engagement, user experience, and conversions.

Traffic is commonly assessed by examining the number of total visits and unique visitors to the site along with the traffic sources. Unique visitors refer to the number of distinct individuals who visit your site based on specific parameters, while traffic sources can include categories such as Organic Search, Direct, and Referral.

This data can be accessed and reviewed in a tracking platform such as Google Analytics 4 (GA4).

If you aren’t already, we would highly recommend setting up a GA4 property so you can measure traffic and engagement across your websites and apps. GA4 is a powerful platform used industry-wide by digital marketers that provides valuable insight on how users interact with your website, apps, and paid ads through advanced tracking, data modelling, AI-powered insights, and seamless integration with a variety of other Google products.

SEO

Measuring the success of your SEO efforts and site content relevance relies on a combination of examining organic search traffic metrics and keyword performance data. Some key organic search traffic metrics include total clicks, impressions, and click-through rates, which can provide a comprehensive view of site visibility in search results. Keyword performance data including position rankings and traffic-driving search queries help provide insight on content relevance and optimization effectiveness.

These metrics are readily available in Google Search Console, a free tool in the Google Suite that allows you to check indexing status, search queries, and optimize the visibility of your site. Just like GA4, we would highly recommend setting up an account on this platform if you haven’t done so already.

Paid Advertising

While each PPC platform in the digital marketing ecosystem operates a bit differently, there are some best practices that apply to most platforms when assessing return on investment (ROI) and the effectiveness of your campaigns.

Establishing clear campaign objectives and key performance indicators (KPIs) such as conversation rate, cost per conversion, and return on ad spend (ROAS) allows you and your team to measure success against predetermined goals. By setting up conversion tracking and attribution models through platforms such as GA4, you can accurately attribute conversions to specific ad campaigns and channels. Additionally, it is highly recommended to monitor and optimize campaign performance and to conduct A/B ad testing experiments. We will cover KPIs, PPC optimizations, and A/B testing in more detail in subsequent sections.

Email Marketing

Evaluating the effectiveness of email marketing involves analyzing various metrics to gauge performance. Metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates help you and your team assess the engagement level of email campaigns. Additionally, metrics such as unsubscribe rates and spam complaints provide insight into audience sentiment and email deliverability.

Segmenting email lists based on subscriber behaviour and demographics allows for targeted messaging and improved campaign performance. Regularly reviewing and interpreting these metrics enables you and your marketing team to identify trends, optimize email content and timing, and ultimately drive better results.

Social Media Assessment

Regardless of the social media platform that you decide to advertise on, engagement and reach are two of the most important metrics to evaluate the effectiveness of your marketing strategy. Platform-specific analytics tools such as Facebook Audience Insights, X Analytics, and Instagram Insights allow you to dig into more specific metrics such as likes, shares, comments, retweets, and reach and allow you to review audience demographics and behaviour.

For all of these platforms, it is considered best practice to regularly analyze data trends to refine content strategies, optimize posting times, and identify high-performing content types to maximize engagement and expand reach effectively.

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is the process by which specific site elements are changed to enhance the likelihood of conversion actions as a result of user behaviour analysis, testing, and data-driven optimizations. The key metrics that we recommend to track in CRO include:

Conversion rate: The percentage of visitors who completed a desired action on your site.
Bounce rate: The percentage of visitors who leave your site without interacting further.
Average session duration: The average amount of time visitors spend on your website during a single session.
Click-through rate (CTR): The percentage of users who click on a specific link or call-to-action (CTA) compared to the total number of users who view the page where the link is displayed.
Revenue per visitor: The average amount of revenue generated from each visitor to your website.

These metrics will help you assess the effectiveness of optimization efforts and identify areas for improvement in the conversion funnel.

Diagnosing Strategy Shortfalls

No digital marketing plan is perfect and shortfalls can come from a variety of sources including bias, blindspots, and knowledge gaps. This is why it is integral for you and your team to be able to identify underperforming areas, understand the common reasons for these shortfalls, and develop actionable solutions to address underperformance.

Understanding Why

Underperformance in your digital marketing efforts can stem from a number of common reasons including targeting the wrong audience, poor message alignment, and inadequate channel optimization.

If your campaigns are failing to resonate with your intended demographic due to inaccurate audience segmentation or insufficient research, you likely are targeting the wrong audience altogether. Poor message alignment occurs when the content fails to address the audience’s needs, pain points, or interests effectively, leading to disengagement and inadequate results.

Additionally, inadequate channel optimization may result in campaigns being distributed on platforms where the target audience isn’t active or where the content format doesn’t match the platform’s norms, diminishing overall impact and reach.

Actionable Solutions

While underperformance is never desirable, the good news is that there are a number of strategies available to address the common issues outlined in the previous paragraph.

Revisiting audience personas is an effective way to ensure accurate segmentation and targeting. By analyzing demographics, behaviours, and preferences, you and your team can refine audience profiles and improve the depth of your targeting.

By refining your ad messaging, you and your team can ensure that you are crafting content that resonates with the identified audience’s needs, pain points, and interests, aligning messaging with their values and aspirations.

By selecting platforms where your target audience is most active, tailoring content for each platform, and through regular optimization you can tangibly enhance the effectiveness of your cross-channel marketing efforts.

Measuring Digital Marketing Effectiveness and ROI

Once you and your team have established who your target audience is and the current status of your digital presence, as well as evaluated the most effective channels for you to advertise your products or services on, the next steps for your team will be to establish key performance indicators (KPIs). Once these are established, we then recommend utilizing analytics and measurement tools to track your progress and calculate the specific return on investment (ROI) for your business. This ensures that your digital marketing efforts are profitable and scalable.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Identifying and tracking the right key performance indicators (KPIs) for your strategy is crucial to ensure alignment with your overarching business objectives.

For an e-commerce business, a KPI can be as straightforward as a quarterly or annual revenue goal based on how many products are sold through your website. If your organization provides products or services for B2B (business-to-business) clients, your digital marketing efforts are likely focused on lead acquisition for your internal sales team or conversion rates for ads on PPC platforms such as Google Ads or Meta Ads.

These examples are just a small sample of a range of metrics that various organizations utilize to measure the effectiveness and return on investment for their digital marketing efforts. If you are looking for additional KPI ideas, SEMRush, a search engine optimization research tool we love to use here at 1UP Digital Marketing, shared a list of 16 marketing KPIs that we recommend checking out.

Whether it’s boosting brand awareness, increasing website traffic, or driving sales, knowing your objectives will help you tailor your evaluation process accordingly.

Analytics and Tools

In the digital marketing ecosystem, there exists a broad range of analytics and tracking platforms tailored to a variety of different channels and platforms. Here is an overview of essential tools that we would recommend to help measure your digital marketing success:

Google Analytics 4: The most widely used tool in digital marketing for tracking website traffic, user behaviour, and conversion metrics. This tool is free and can be easily integrated with other platforms in the Google Suite including Google Search Console, Google Tag Manager, and Google Ads.
Facebook Insights, X Analytics, and Instagram Analytics: Native social media analytics tools that provide valuable insights into audience demographics, engagement metrics, and content performance.
Mailchimp, Constant Contact: Email marketing platforms that provide robust in-house analytics for measuring open rates, click-through rates, and subscriber behaviour.
HubSpot, Marketo: Marketing automation tools that enable comprehensive tracking of campaign performance across multiple channels, allowing you and your team to assess return on investment (ROI) and make data-driven decisions to optimize your strategies.

ROI Calculation

Return on investment (ROI) measures how much revenue your marketing efforts generate based on the amount of money your organization is willing to spend to generate a sale, lead, or other high-value conversions. Your organization’s ROI can be calculated by using a basic formula like this:

ROI = (Net Profit/Total Cost)*100

Using the example of an e-commerce business with a paid ads annual account budget of $10,000 that drove $30,000, their ROI was 300%: ($30,000 / $10,000) * 100 = 300.

By calculating your ROI you can simplify the process to understand your returns, giving you immediate insight into the effectiveness of your digital marketing strategy.

Refining Your Strategy

After going through all of the outlined steps to review your business objectives, KPIs, current strengths and shortfalls, you and your team have completed a comprehensive evaluation of your digital marketing strategy. Your strategy is essentially a living document and your team must engage in iterative improvement and A/B testing to proactively optimize your initiatives to achieve your KPIs at the most favourable ROI for your business.

Iterative Improvement

An iterative approach to strategy refinement allows you and your team to adapt to changing trends, technologies and consumer behaviours proactively and efficiently. By utilizing data-driven insights, you and your team can make informed decisions based on real-time performance metrics rather than relying solely on intuition or past experiences. This ensures that adjustments are targeted and effective, maximizing ROI.

Using Google Ads as an example, regularly analyzing metrics such as click-through rates and conversion rates allows you and your team to identify and act on opportunities to optimize ad copy, keywords, and bidding strategies. Strategy refinement is truly a constant cycle of improvement that needs to be repeated to make the most of your marketing efforts.

A/B Testing for Optimization

As referenced in the section of this blog on CRO, A/B testing is a powerful method to systematically enhance the effectiveness of digital marketing strategies by comparing different approaches and identifying the most impactful tactics. This tactic is commonly applied to websites as part of CRO, however, it can also be applied to paid advertising and email marketing efforts. Here are the A/B Testing core steps:

Define what you want to test: These elements or variables can include ad headlines, image and video assets, call-to-action buttons, or email subject lines.
Create your test variants: Develop two or more versions (A and B) of these elements, ensuring they are distinct and measurable.
Launch your test: Implement the variations simultaneously to similar audience segments, ensuring proper randomization to mitigate bias.
Collect your data: Analyze relevant metrics such as click-through rates, conversion rates, or engagement metrics to determine which version performs better.
Select the winner: Once statistically significant results are obtained, implement the winning variation.

A/B testing is a detailed process that requires proper set-up, clear objectives, and above all patience. To learn more about how to get started with A/B testing, check out this handy guide from SEMRush.

Best Practices and Common Pitfalls

To recap all of the information we have covered in this blog, this next section outlines some best practices and common pitfalls to avoid when evaluating and adjusting your digital marketing strategy.

Best Practices

Clarify Your Business Objectives: Ensure that your digital marketing goals are aligned with your overall business strategy to maximize ROI.
Understand Your Digital Presence: Familiarize yourself with your customers’ online behaviours, interactions, and preferences across different digital platforms to effectively target your audience.
Evaluate Your Digital Marketing Channels: Take stock of who your target audience is and what channels you are currently utilizing to reach them. This is a prime opportunity to map the customer journey on your site, evaluate the SEO friendliness of your website, review the current structure of your paid and email marketing accounts, and consider implementing Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO).
Diagnose Strategy Shortfalls: Identify any underperforming areas, determine the reasons behind their performance, and implement actions to resolve them as part of the strategy evaluation process.
Measuring Success and ROI: Establish key performance indicators (KPIs), deploy analytics and measurement tools, and calculate return on investment (ROI) to ensure that digital marketing efforts are profitable and scalable.
Iterative Improvement: Embrace an iterative approach to strategy refinement by adapting to changing trends, technologies, and consumer behaviours using data-driven insights to maximize ROI.
A/B Testing for Optimization: Conduct A/B testing to systematically enhance the effectiveness of digital marketing strategies by comparing different approaches and identifying the most impactful tactics for website elements, paid advertising, and email marketing efforts.

Common Pitfalls

Not Setting Clear Objectives: Without clear goals, it’s difficult to measure the success of your digital marketing efforts. Make sure that you and your team are aligned on your business objectives, KPIs, and expected ROI for your marketing efforts.
Ignoring Data & Audience Insights: Without collecting and analyzing relevant data on your online customer journey and your target audience, your decision-making processes will be hindered where adjustments to your strategy might be required. Ensure that you have the proper analytics tools in place, you have clear KPIs, and you are regularly updating your buyer personas.
Focusing Solely on Metrics: Analyzing data is an important facet of optimizing your digital marketing efforts. However, direct customer feedback, in the form of reviews, survey responses, and social media comments, provides valuable insights on how customers view your brand and how well your product or service meets their needs.
Lack of Flexibility: Digital marketing is constantly changing especially with the emergence of new technologies and platforms to connect with your audience. Don’t be afraid to pivot your strategy if necessary based on changes in consumer behaviour, technological advancements, or the competitive landscape.
Overlooking Mobile Optimization: With a majority of internet users accessing content through mobile devices, neglecting mobile optimization can result in a significant loss of potential customers on your site. Ensure your website and marketing materials are mobile-friendly.
Failure to Monitor Competitors: Ignoring your competitors’ digital marketing strategies can put your organization at a disadvantage. Keep an eye on their activities to identify emerging trends, discover new opportunities, and stay ahead in the market.

Conclusion

Evaluating and refining your digital marketing is crucial to maximize your organization’s opportunity for sustained success.

Regular assessment allows you to uncover what’s working, identify areas for improvement, and seize new opportunities that can significantly impact your business’ performance both in the short and long term. We encourage you and your team to continually assess and adapt your strategy to maintain a competitive edge and for improved results.

Looking for assistance with evaluating your organization’s digital marketing strategy? Contact us today to receive personalized assistance from our team. We look forward to providing you with expert insight on how to enhance your strategy.

How To Evaluate Your Company’s Digital Marketing Strategy