Find out which marketing campaigns are your keepers

With the holiday rush and any post-holiday orders over, now's a good time to dig into your results.

Ideally you tracked your traffic and orders which will make things easier (e.g. Google's UTM codes).

Even if you didn't, you might be able to look at the timing of orders to see which campaigns where active. (And make a note to add UTM codes next time)

There's a bunch of metrics you can look at for each campaign but start with questions to guide your review:

Was this campaign effective?

Would I want to run it as-in next time?

You get decide on what effectiveness means. Most campaigns will use revenue or profit for that, but if you ran an awareness campaign or win-back campaign you might look at order numbers or even something basic like traffic. Some metrics like repurchases and order latency timing will need an app and software to calculate the results but you can get deeper insights than the basic total revenue measurements.

The point of this exercise isn't to improve the campaigns yet. It's to find which ones worked so you can keep them and junk the rest.

Ideally you'd follow-up this review with a cycle of improvements but even if you don't, you can still reuse the campaigns as-in (updating dates, products, etc).

Running the same campaigns year-after-year doesn't catch headlines and can be a bit boring...

... but boring pays the bills and keeps the lights on.

Adjusting the working campaigns a bit each year along with introducing a new campaign now and then is a solid low-stress marketing strategy that pays dividends.

Eric Davis