There are many key performance indicators that can be used to track the success of marketing campaigns. One of the most important metrics is incremental sales. This is the amount of additional revenue that resulted from an indirect marketing campaign. In other words, it is the amount of money that you made thanks to a campaign that you wouldn’t have made otherwise through your sales team’s efforts.
This is useful because it can be utilized to identify whether your indirect marketing efforts are generating a worthwhile return on investment. To use this metric to its fullest extent, it is best to track incremental sales on a per-campaign basis. Doing so will provide insight into how beneficial your social media ads are compared to your email marketing campaigns. It may sound challenging to track incremental sales, since it is essentially comparing your results against what they would have been without a particular campaign. Historically, this was definitely an elusive KPI for most marketers. Even today, trying to accurately track incremental sales for conventional media campaigns is nearly impossible. However, for digital marketing campaign, it is absolutely doable.
There are two types of conversions that need to be tracked in order to determine whether a digital marketing campaign is being effective: click-through conversions and view-through conversions. The former is extremely easy to track and nearly every digital ad network will already provide you with this metric. Additionally, you can use a variety of website analytics tools to determine where visitors are coming from and which ones convert. View-through conversions on the other hand are a little bit more difficult. These are the visitors who view your digital ad, then in another tab or browser window visit your website and convert without ever actually clicking on your advertisement. These can fortunately be tracked by many digital ad serving networks. Essentially you will define a window in which a browser who is served an ad then later visits your website is considered a view-through conversion. Using the data from both of these types of conversions, you can see how much additional revenue is being generated thanks to your digital marketing campaigns. Of course this does miss the value that brand marketing is generating in terms of convincing sales leads. However, without knowing what buyers are thinking, this factor will generally remain fairly elusive.
Nonetheless, for any marketer, knowing the incremental sales generated by each digital marketing campaign is extremely valuable. This data can be used to determine if a campaign is reaching enough eyes or if its content is engaging and persuasive enough. Using incremental sales and A/B testing, you can identify the best mix of ad placement, frequency, and content in order to generate as many new sales as possible. If you break the data down even further to examine which sales are resulting from new customers and which from repeat customers, you can identify if you campaign is most effective as a reminder or as a persuasive effort. Tracking incremental sales and other such KPIs is essential to being able to scientifically analyze whether your promotional efforts are worth the necessary time and resources or not.