Essential marketing measurement tools for effective campaigns

How do you get your finance team or CFO to sign off on investment for your marketing efforts? By proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that your marketing campaigns are driving continuous success.

Next question: how exactly do you prove that?

The answer: with the right digital marketing measurement tools.

Your tech stack should prioritize tools that help you get the job done but that also show just how well you did that job. When your digital marketing campaigns are helping your products or services fly out of the door, you should be able to tell the world (and your finance director). However, it's not just about looking for a pat on the back. The right marketing measurement tools help highlight successes and failures, so you know exactly what you need to tweak to take your digital marketing strategies to the next level.

Understanding marketing measurement

Digital marketing success is only measurable when you've set key performance indicators (KPIs) that are meaningful to your organization. These might include:

• Click-through rates (CTR) for various ads
• Marketing return on investment (ROI)
• Customer acquisition cost (CAC)
• Customer lifetime value (CLV)
• Various metrics on your website's performance

...and a whole host more. While each of these KPIs gives you a little piece of the puzzle, you need the whole boxload of pieces to get the finished picture. Just looking at CAC is like only having two corners of a vast landscape puzzle. You'll never really understand what you're supposed to be looking at without the rest of those edge and middle pieces. For example, you'll get closer to the complete picture by understanding how CAC drives CLV and how both impact your overall ROI.

Marketing measurement should be holistic, providing the broadest possible view of your marketing mix while also allowing you to hone in on incredibly granular data as needed.

What are marketing measurement tools?

The difficulty in managing all these KPIs is that there are so many of them, and your firm might change which are most relevant every few weeks. The associated marketing data that drives those KPIs comes from multiple and often shifting channels. That's why marketing measurement tools are essential. These software applications track and analyze the performance of your marketing efforts, providing valuable insights into your chosen key metrics.

Adding marketing measurement tools to your tech stack means you can quickly assess the impact of online marketing efforts and quantify the effectiveness of overall marketing strategies. More importantly, you can identify areas for improvement and put those improvements into action fast.

Why measure the performance of marketing campaigns?

Now you know what marketing measurement tools do. Why is it so critical that you invest in detailed analytics tools or KPI trackers?

Primarily, it's so you can make data-driven decisions rather than relying on guesswork. Say you have a super successful campaign for your e-commerce store. You sell a bunch of featured items and profits skyrocket. Everyone is happy, from the marketing manager to the finance director. But do you really understand what led to that success?

You could just create a carbon copy of the campaign for the next product launch and hope for the best. However, the market will have shifted, consumer demands may have changed — and, more importantly, you still don't know what caused such a boost in sales.

The right marketing analytics platform or tool can lead your marketing department to data-driven insights. Your team might learn critical things about your target audience or discover an unusual market fluctuation that led to success. Marketing measurement tools can also be used with predictive analytics software to plan for the future. Set campaigns in motion that use historical data to power tomorrow's success.

When you know what's working and why, you can allocate your marketing budget to exactly the right channels. It's also so much simpler to align your marketing efforts with your wider business goals to drive more revenue and better brand recognition.

Key features of marketing measurement tools

Before you go software shopping for the best analytics tool on the market, it helps to know exactly what you're looking for. Start by figuring out exactly what business metrics you need to track. Are you looking for something to provide more insight into your Google Ads performance or to assess search engine optimization (SEO)? Your needs will drive your software buying more than any guide you find online.

Once you know what you want, consider any app's core functionality. Each new addition to your tech stack should be able to integrate with your marketing data sources. For example, if you're an e-commerce business using Shopify and Square, look for tools that offer those integrations right out of the box.

Check the software's features. "Measuring marketing performance" is pretty vague, so look for more specific details on the marketing metrics each app will track and analyze. You also need to ensure the new tools are accessible to everyone on your marketing teams. Data visualization and graphical dashboards are far more useful than streams of numbers or code.

Finally, the best marketing measurement tools should be customizable to your needs. There really is no one-size-fits-all approach to marketing measurement. Tools will only provide valuable insights if they're tailored to your data, customers and strategies.

Top marketing measurement tools

There are thousands of digital marketing measurement tools available. Narrowing the list down to the essentials is like finding that missing corner piece of the puzzle we were stuck on earlier. However, we've pulled together some of the most popular to give you an idea of what's making it into marketing tech stacks.

Web analytics tools

Your business website, blog or online store is a major pillar of your business strategy. Without ways to measure website traffic, CTRs, blog hits, web-based attribution and lead generation statistics, it's impossible to know how hard your site is really working for you. Here are a few top web analytics tools you could integrate into your digital marketing performance measurement suite.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is part of the wider Google Marketing Platform and is designed to provide performance insights through links to Google Ads, Google Cloud, Google Search Console and more. You can also connect Google Analytics to your website to monitor traffic and visitor data.

You can see who visits, where from and for how long. Discover which pages get the most traffic but which cause the reader to click away quickly. Figure out which parts of your website have the most time on page and which trigger a higher bounce rate and use those insights to drive your next web-based marketing campaign.

SEMrush

SEMrush is a more SEO-focused tool. It tracks website traffic and performance but also provides competitor analysis features by allowing you to see what's driving traffic to other websites. There are also competitor social media trackers, advertising research and even Google Maps rankings for your own or other businesses.

SEMrush also offers keyword research and suggestions to help improve search engine results pages (SERP) rankings. You can use these tools for both existing and new campaigns to try and beat your competitors or simply raise your rankings.

Hotjar

A lesser-known Chappell Roan hit? No, it's H-O-T-J-A-R, Hotjar, a user experience tracking tool that provides heatmaps, session recordings and user feedback to gain valuable insights into consumer behavior.

Hotjar provides metrics on what web users are doing but also focuses on the "why." It examines details like webpage friction, or the parts of your website that make it difficult for visitors to get the information they need. Engagement heatmaps show where users are moving their mouse or fingers most, so web marketers can shift the important messages around. Hotjar focuses on improving web visitor experiences to drive lead generation and conversion.

Social Media Measurement Tools

With 63% of marketers stating that social media offers the highest ROI compared to other channels, measuring the impact of your social media marketing efforts is essential. Both these tools offer different ways to achieve that.

Hootsuite

If you're a social media marketer, you must have heard of Hootsuite. This popular, multi-channel social media management platform offers everything from automation to analytics to customer response collations.

Marketers can add a Hootsuite button to their own browser to quickly share online content across multiple channels. They can schedule posts and then see the impact of those posts so they can tweak the content for next time. Hootsuite trawls your social media channels for customer questions and pulls them into a single destination so marketers can assess consumer sentiment quickly. There's also the option to draft various responses to queries and store them so marketers can deploy them with a single click.

Hootsuite is an all-in-one social media performance platform, connecting to multiple social media platforms and providing unified insights from a single app.

Meta Pixel

Meta Pixel, previously Facebook Pixel, is a piece of code provided by Meta, the tech giant behind Facebook, Instagram, Threads and more. Marketers integrate the Pixel into their own website to provide insights into on-page behaviors. The examples provided by Meta include seeing how many times a user adds an item to the basket or how much time they spend on particular pages.

The most useful feature of Meta Pixel is that it highlights when a customer has come to your website or online store after seeing an ad on Instagram or Facebook. You can use this data for retargeting and creating campaigns that you know will be successful. Meta Pixel can work alongside Meta's Conversions API for more accurate and reliable data and connectivity.

Email Marketing Measurement Tools

Email marketing has consistently offered high conversion rates: 2.4% for B2C organizations and 2.8% for B2B. Use these tools to track the effectiveness of your email campaigns.

Mailchimp

Email marketers wanting a one-stop-shop for email marketing often rely on Mailchimp. The platform offers everything from content creation aids to powerful measurement and tracking features. Mailchimp offers tools for analyzing the customer journey and providing insights into email campaign performance, enabling businesses to constantly refine their email marketing strategy.

Use A/B testing tools to discover exactly what's driving CTR from your emails and find the perfect campaign for even tiny audience segments. Integrate your email campaigns into omnichannel strategies for increased consistency and brand cohesiveness. Mailchimp allows you to ensure that your emails become a significant part of your overall marketing efforts, not just an afterthought.

One of Mailchimp's benefits is that it uses the performance data it collects to suggest improvements to future campaigns. So, you can see how you're performing and know pretty much straight away what you can do to improve that performance.

Klaviyo

The Klaviyo website boasts that it's used by over 157,000 brands, so it's a good bet that this marketing automation platform offers some robust features. Those features include an intuitive email editor with mobile optimization to ensure customers who shop on their phones or tablets don't miss out. You can also do more with your email contact lists, such as merging them or automatically removing duplicate contact entries.

But does Klaviyo help you understand your email campaign performance? Absolutely, thanks to a ton of customizable dashboards and reporting features. They promote their customer data platform (CDP) as a "single source of truth" that captures data from dozens of integrations and uses it to hone email content. It then monitors the performance of emails to show how much you're spending per recipient, total revenue attributed to emails and more.

Klaviyo also provides tools for SMS marketing, helping marketers automate messages and, again, gain insights into how impactful those messages are.

SEO and content measurement tools

SEO is still a critical part of digital content marketing. Without content that consistently ranks highly on search pages, your brand can get lost in the crowd. These marketing tools focus on SEO and optimizing content to get it in front of potential leads.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs (named for hypertext referencing in HTML) has been a top name in SEO since 2010. Huge enterprises like Meta and Adobe use Ahrefs, but the platform also offers free tools that you can use on your own website, making it accessible to companies of all sizes.

The Ahrefs platform uses web and search engine crawlers to assess the visibility of sites and how likely they are to rank for specific keywords or search phrases. Paying users can use these features to discover how their competitors are doing in comparison to their own SEO efforts.

One of the most thorough features is the SEO audit, which claims to identify and help you fix over 170 SEO-related issues with your website. You get an overall health score which is a general overview of how well every link in your site is set up. Broken links drag the score down, as do links to irrelevant content. You'll also get data on SEO faux pas, such as meta descriptions that are too long or pages without an H1 header.

While these details might seem inconsequential, together, they can lower the visibility of your website, store, or blog. Ahrefs brings all the errors and flaws into a single dashboard so you can immediately see what needs fixing.

Other Ahrefs features include keyword research tools, backlink analysis and resources to help marketers understand SEO better.

Moz Pro

Moz is another all-in-one SEO platform that takes a slightly different approach from Ahrefs. For example, while you can assess competitors with a (paid) Ahrefs subscription, Moz Pro will highlight who your competitors are and suggest keyword opportunities based on this data. Moz also focuses more on website analytics, offering insights to help adjust on-page content and structure to drive more leads.

Moz uses AI-powered keyword research tools to provide data on the volume and reach of specific terms, as well as offering grouped keyword suggestions. This platform also offers search intent insights, suggesting the reasons why website visitors were searching for certain phrases, helping content marketers tailor content to particular audience segments. It's a level of SEO focus that helps with techniques like hyper-personalization.

Choosing the tools for measuring your marketing efforts

Each of these tools offers different features and benefits. They can each help you complete that marketing puzzle, but you can't buy every single one on the market. Follow these steps when you're in the market for new marketing measurement tools.

Consider your marketing goals and objectives

You need to know what you want to measure and why. Consider your overall marketing goals and check in with other areas in your business to make sure your goals are aligned. Investing in a tool (or tools) that help drive customer experience KPIs up as well as marketing metrics helps your business achieve holistic success.

If your current business goal is to drive more sales of a particular product or service, focus on tools that can offer insights that relate to the channels where you promote those goods. For your firm, that might mean website analytics tools or ad-monitoring apps that help you break down the performance of highly targeted campaigns.

Make sure every tool you choose is usable by everyone on your marketing team. If you invest in tools that are incomprehensible to anyone except a qualified data scientist, your new apps might actually work against your marketing goals instead of getting you closer to them.

Evaluate tool features and pricing

Check what features the tool offers and if it actually provides value. Do you already have two-thirds of the features in other software? In that case, it's probably not the best value to invest in that app just to get the few features you're missing. See if there's an alternative that offers better value for money and the right features.

It's also important to check the price of the tool fits your budget constraints. Overspending slightly now for a huge ROI later could be a smart move. However, if you can't guarantee stellar results, you're unlikely to get the buy-in for that from your finance team. Ideally, choose tools that you can already afford or consider swapping existing ones out for platforms that offer more. See if there's the option to take a free trial to test drive the features that matter most to your business.

Above all, you need to make sure that the tool's features align with your needs, integrate with your existing martech stack and provide actionable insights. New tools should allow you to do more and understand your marketing performance better. Check trusted review sites for comments from your peers on how intuitive the interface is, how easy it is to set up and how reliable the support functions are.

Bringing it all together

Bringing all your marketing measurement tools into a single dashboard or comprehensive set of visualizations is, in our opinion, the best way to monitor and improve your marketing KPIs. If you can see how each channel is performing at the click of a button, you can quickly assess exactly where you need to focus your efforts.

Funnel offers more precise marketing measurement via the triangulation of marketing mix modeling, incrementally testing and multi-touch attribution. With the end of third-party cookies in sight, you need data on consumer behavior from as many sources as possible and ways to understand how those behaviors are driving sales and engagement. Understanding the incremental impact of each customer touchpoint empowers you to make the most of your marketing budgets.

As marketing gets more complex with customer interactions coming from more channels than ever, you need marketing analytics tools that can handle a whole lot more data than ever before. To find out more about placing your marketing measurements center stage, get in touch.