Measuring Your Success During the Season of Selling

• Updated on: 2021-01-09
• Read original article here

Before you even begin reading this, take a moment to pat yourself on the back. Black Friday. Cyber Monday. Boxing Day. You managed to make it through the busiest online shopping year to date. Well done.

Now it’s time to dive into the data and measure marketing success. Measuring the analytics from the holiday shopping season is how you figure out where your profits stand. Furthermore, you’ll learn what worked and what didn’t, so you can optimize your marketing for next year.

This may seem overwhelming, but fear not. We’re going to explain what data you should be looking for, how to analyze it, and how to use it for more success in future years.

The only analytics you should be comparing yourself to in order to measure marketing success are your own analytics from previous years. If 2020 was your first year selling online, don’t skip this section. There’s plenty to learn that you can keep in the back of your mind for next year.

Some questions to ask yourself about previous year’s analytics are:

1. How much revenue do you attribute to email marketing? This is a metric you should be keeping track of. If you don’t have it, use this year to set a benchmark for your business.

2. Which emails drove results? This will help you focus on which emails to use in the future. Questions you should be asking yourself are:

KPIs, or Key Performance Indicators, are measurable values that demonstrate how effectively your company is achieving its key business objectives. You should be using KPIs at multiple levels to evaluate the success of reaching your goals.

We’ve narrowed down the top 4 KPIs you should be focused on to measure marketing success after the holiday season.

If your conversion rate is not as high as you’d like, focus on improving your site content, creating a more user friendly web-design, and personalizing messages for your shoppers.

If your KPI analysis is telling you that social media is where you should be spending your marketing budget, it will be important to measure those ads accurately.

Facebook for Business, Twitter for Business, and LinkedIn Business Solutions are the best tools to run and measure your social media marketing presence.

When it comes to tracking display, paid, and organic traffic, Google Analytics is your best bet.

Google Drive, or desktop folders are where you need to be storing your data. Make a folder for each holiday that you wish to keep tabs on. For example, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Boxing Day, Valentine’s Day etc.

It’s super important that you jot down your takeaways ASAP after these holidays. Write down some notes about what worked and what didn’t while they’re still fresh in your mind. This will help you set goals for next year and have tangible numbers that you can aim to hit.

Measuring data helps you see where you went wrong and improve in future years. You’ll get a better understanding of consumer behaviour when you analyze the data and you’ll eventually notice an improvement on your marketing instincts.

By measuring the KPIs we’ve mentioned above, you’ll secure yourself some extremely useful data that will provide great insights for years to come.

As always, please reach out to us with any questions or feel free to check out any of our marketing tip videos, such as the one below highlighting how to add gift cards as a product on your website!