Marketing is an intensive and expensive exercise for businesses, but it is a necessary one.

To ensure that a company grows into a profitable enterprise, marketing teams need to assess their practices and define what has been working and what areas require improvement.

But marketing is a vast field—what areas should assessors focus on to understand which areas to examine?

We look at the five most popular assessment methods in the field of marketing to create a comprehensive annual report.

1. Web Traffic

The majority of businesses have a website with most of their marketing efforts aimed at increasing web traffic.

One of the primary marketing assessment types that companies use is in determining the amount of web traffic they should be getting and what is required to achieve those numbers.

Some important elements of assessing web traffic that can be plotted by creating a graph are:

  • Month-to-month web traffic increase
  • Year-on-year web traffic increase
  • New website visitors
  • Best sources for web traffic
  • Length of sessions
  • Pageviews
  • Conversion Rates
  • Exit Rate
  • Bounce rate

These web traffic metrics are generally used to assess how well the company’s marketing campaigns are working.

2. Social Media Metrics

Another essential marketing assessment type that is extensively used by marketers is examining social media metrics.

Alongside websites, most companies have a strong presence on social media, from the oldest platforms like Facebook to the latest entrants, such as TikTok.

Each channel has its own particular set of key performance indicators that can be used to examine how well marketing efforts are going, but there are also overlapping metrics that can be used when building social media reports.

Below are a few of the metrics used to determine social media marketing campaigns:

  • Likes
  • Shares/ Retweets/ Reposts/ Pins
  • Comments
  • Link clicks
  • Reach

Social media metrics such as the above are some of the best ways of assessing whether a marketing campaign is successful.

3. Email Click and Open Rates

Email marketing has become a powerful method for businesses to interact with their customers on a regular basis.

When it comes to assessing email marketing’s success, click and open rates are the major determining factor as to how good your content is.

The reason for this is that designing newsletter templates and sending emails is only a small part of the email marketing campaign.

Once people receive the emails in their inbox, they need to open the email and read it so that they can learn more about your company, products, and services.

Additionally, once subscribers have opened the email, they need to click on the links embedded within—such as on blog links, social media links, calls-to-action, and buy buttons.

By assessing these numbers—through your mail distribution client—you can determine whether or not your email marketing is successful and what needs to be changed.

Advertising may have become popular in traditional media channels such as newspapers and radio, but it has taken the digital world by storm.

Some of the advertising methods that are used most often include:

  • Social media advertising
  • Google ads
  • Website banner ads
  • Newsletter banner ads

The reason why digital ads have become popular is because they tend to be far less expensive than traditional media ads.

However, that still means a certain amount of monetary investment from the company, and the effectiveness of this investment needs to be measured.

When examining advertising-related costs, marketers should be looking at these metrics:

  • Cost Per Click – how much is spent from your ad budget for each click
  • Click-Through Rate – similar to email click rates, this metric measures how many times your advertising link was clicked on
  • Cost Per Conversion – this metric is necessary for commercial sites selling a product and determines how well an ad led to actual sales, and not just site visits
  • Cost Per Acquisition – companies need to distinguish between new and old customers and this metric helps marketers understand how much is spent acquiring new customers

Advertising can result in high yield for companies but they need to make sure that the amount of investment they are putting in is worth it.

Determining the costs for an advertising campaign against the metrics you are aiming for will help marketers assess where their marketing is headed.

5. ROI

Return on investment (ROI) follows a similar structure to assessing advertising-related costs but on a much larger, company-wide scale.

All marketing efforts—websites, social media, content marketing, digital advertising—have to be outlined and then measure against the monetary investment required in their maintenance.

How much money is being used in these departments and how well are they doing?

Assessing what areas are giving more output and improving reach and which ones aren’t will help marketers calculate ROI and decide where the budget needs to go for better results.

Summing Up

Running a company requires a great deal of on-going assessment of all the company’s resources. This includes the marketing campaigns that a business undertakes.

By using the above assessment techniques for marketing, companies will be better placed to determine what areas need improvement, and which ones are doing well as they are.