How do you know if your marketing campaigns are working? Maybe sales are increasing, but can you attribute those sales to your marketing efforts? What if you’re doing multichannel marketing? How do you know which channels were most effective? These questions come up again and again in marketing: see our articles Measuring and Optimizing Marketing ROI and “But Which Content Made the Sale?”: Measuring Content ROI, for example.

Measuring marketing effectiveness is elusive for many businesses. It can be so elusive that it leads businesses to extremes: either not measuring it at all and just trusting it works or cutting the marketing budget to zero since marketing ROI is so difficult to prove. You don’t have to go to either extreme if you know which data is helpful and which data needs more context to be helpful.

Marketing Campaigns

The typical business does a lot of marketing—sending out emails, posting blogs and social media content, buying ads—but it is often unfocused. Campaign-based marketing focuses your marketing efforts on specific goals and objectives to be achieved within a defined timeframe. Campaigns ensure you’re not just marketing to market but creating clear, defined messages around particular events, like a product launch, seasonal sales, or events.

First, Set Goals

You won’t know if any endeavor is a success unless you first define what success looks like. Every marketing campaign should have measurable, achievable goals that align with the goals of your marketing strategy. Narrowly defining what you want a marketing campaign to achieve will make the campaign easier to implement and make it more likely to be successful. Well-defined goals will also make success easier to measure.

Measuring the effectiveness of a marketing campaign isn’t all that different from measuring the effectiveness of your marketing strategy or of your individual pieces of marketing content. The marketing campaign exists in the middle ground between the two: it is informed by strategy, and it is made of content.

Useful Metrics

The useful metrics will vary by campaign type and the goals of your campaign. Here are some of the common metrics associated with different types of marketing campaigns

Conversion rate measures the number of people who saw the campaign who took the desired action. “Conversion” often refers to a sale, but different campaigns may be targeted to different parts of the customer journey.

Email click-through rate is like conversion rate, but  for email. It’s not enough that your emails are being opened. What’s important is that receivers are taking action.

Channel attribution tells you which marketing channels are providing which type of conversions so you can focus your efforts on the most effective channels or take steps to improve the performance of ineffective channels.

Contextual Metrics

Take note of which metrics are not listed: social media followers, email open rates, page views, shares. Often known as “vanity metrics,” these look good on a report, but only to someone who doesn’t know what effective marketing looks like. These metrics aren’t completely useless; taken in the context of other metrics, they can help you diagnose problems with your marketing campaigns. Your website might be getting views, for example, but once they’re there, they’re not taking further actions. The high number of views tells you that whatever you’re doing to make your site visible is working, but the actual content or calls to action on the site need work.

A CRM System Brings it all Together

Campaigns are the key to successful marketing. If your marketing is campaign based and strategic and not purely tactical, you’ve already set yourself up for a better marketing ROI. Getting the most out of your marketing dollars and measuring the effectiveness of your marketing campaign, however, requires some technological help in the form of a customer relationship management system (CRM). A CRM becomes your single source of truth for all analytics—website, email, social media, and ads—and gives you the tools your team needs to analyze the data, make informed decisions, and execute marketing tasks such as segmenting lists and automating workflows.

Measuring marketing campaign effectiveness with data is no longer something that confers a competitive advantage. It’s the minimum a modern business needs to succeed. Make it as easy as possible with a CRM.