3 Easy Ways to Monitor Campaign Performance + Metrics to Track

Learn how to monitor campaign performance like the pros in this handy guide. Check out recommended tools, key metrics to track, best practices to follow, and common pitfalls to avoid.

Developing a great marketing strategy can feel like a shot in the dark.

You’re trying to attract new customers through diverse marketing channels, but it’s not working. You’re blowing your budget on ineffective campaigns. And your boss isn’t happy.

If that feels too real, there’s a simple solution: campaign performance monitoring.

Campaign performance monitoring enables you to analyze how consumers interact with your marketing campaigns – and sets you up for future campaign success.

Whether you’re looking to advance your ad rankings, improve the performance of your social media campaigns, or boost your lead generation, effective campaign performance monitoring helps you make the most of every marketing dollar.

What is campaign performance monitoring?

Performance monitoring gives you a comprehensive look at your digital marketing campaign across various metrics, allowing you to assess what’s going well and what gaps need filling.

3 Top campaign monitoring tools on the market

It’s impossible to stay on top of your campaign without an effective performance monitoring tool. Let’s look at the pros and cons of some of the best campaign monitoring tools on the market.

Google Analytics

The best-known campaign monitoring tool on the market is Google Analytics.

Pros

• Free: Google Analytics is free to use, making it an attractive option for small businesses, start-ups, and other cost-sensitive companies.
• Easy integration: You probably already use some of Google’s services in your marketing operations. Google Analytics integrates easily with Google Ads and Google Search Console.

Source: Google Support

• Customizable: Google Analytics is customizable, so you can adjust your dashboard to show the metrics you’re most interested in.

Cons

• Complicated: Due to the wide range of tools and analytics it offers, Google Analytics has a pretty steep learning curve.
• Minimal customer support: Google does a good job of producing guides to learning the platform, the customer support for this free tool is pretty limited.

HubSpot

HubSpot offers another great campaign monitoring tool. HubSpot is a full CRM platform that has a long list of software that can aid in your marketing efforts, including your campaign monitoring.

Pros

• Comprehensive: HubSpot does a lot more than monitor campaigns. If you’re seeking a CRM that’ll provide insights into ads on social media platforms, like Instagram and LinkedIn, analysis of email marketing campaigns, and brilliant organization, HubSpot is a great fit.
• User-friendly: While it offers a wide range of capabilities, HubSpot is known for its user-friendly interface.
• Robust analytics: HubSpot’s performance monitoring analytics are extremely detailed, providing a great return on your investment.

Source: HubSpot

Cons

• Cost: HubSpot requires a substantial financial investment — though it’s priced at several different tiers depending on your needs.
• Complex: Because HubSpot’s uses go far beyond performance monitoring, the complexity of the software’s offerings can be intimidating.

Anodot

Anodot is specifically designed to help you notice what is and isn’t working in your ad campaigns. It interprets data to relate your campaign performance to your bottom line.

Pros

• Single-intent: Anodot’s sole service is campaign monitoring. This means you won’t need to pay for or click through other services you don’t need.
• Visual data display: Anodot excels at translating data into visuals that are intuitive and easy to understand.

Source: Anodot

• Customizable: You can customize and automate alerts, and orient your dashboard to show the metrics you’re most concerned about.

Cons

• Initial setup difficulties: Some users reported that Anodot is a bit difficult to set up, particularly for non-engineers.
• Cost: Anodot’s rich, machine-learning-based analytics have a steep price tag.

ConversionIQ

Clients working with HawkSEM get to benefit from our proprietary software, ConversionIQ. ConversionIQ uses AI to draw powerful, accurate conclusions regarding your campaign’s conversions.

Lots of analytics tools tell portions of the story, but don’t bridge the gap between the most important question marketers have: what makes clients convert?

ConversionIQ’s entire focus is tracking a customer from ad impression to conversion:

Source: HawkSEM

As HawkSEM President Rambod Yadegar explains, performance monitoring is a critical part of every campaign we run:

“Tracking is an essential part of any PPC campaign. We use ConversionIQ (CIQ) to granularity track every single step of the buyer journey so we can understand what aspects of a campaign are working and where we should trim the fat. This allows us to optimize toward higher ROAS, MoM, and YoY.”

ConversionIQ is only available to HawkSEM clients. If you want to take your performance monitoring to the next level, reach out and book a free consultation today.

Best practices for campaign monitoring

1. Set clear, data-based goals before you begin your campaign
2. Incorporate frequent monitoring into your schedule
3. Use A/B testing
4. Keep an eye on SEO
5. Start with optimized content

1. Set clear, data-based goals before you begin your campaign

Laying out clear goals before launching your campaign sets you up for performance monitoring success.

Set goals that are clear and quantifiable, based on benchmarks and historical performance data. With this foundation, you’ll have a great blueprint for your campaign performance monitoring.

2. Incorporate frequent monitoring into your schedule

Even if you intend to monitor your analytics frequently, it’s easy to prioritize other tasks that seem more urgent. Frequently block out time in your schedule to look at your campaign’s performance.

This time investment may feel pointless initially, but if your metrics aren’t where they should be, you’ll be glad you spotted the problem early.

Set up analytics tools to notify you if things start to go off the rails. If you’re like most marketers and have a million things on your plate, that can be a lifesaver.

3. Prioritize agility

It’s easy to become rigid and attached to a specific campaign strategy. But usually the best approach is to be flexible.

The companies that benefit the most from monitoring are the ones willing to follow what the data tells them. Prioritize flexibility when optimizing your website and campaigns to get the most out of performance monitoring.

4. Use A/B testing

One of the biggest advantages of performance monitoring is the ability to compare and contrast results. Use split testing in your ad groups, landing pages, and site copy to find what’s working and what needs improvement.

Effective monitoring tools let you see your overall metrics, as well as compartmentalized metrics for A/B testing. With these insights, zero in on the changes you need to make to optimize your campaigns for the best results.

Source: Semrush

5. Keep an eye on SEO

Don’t get so blinded by performance metrics that you neglect search engine optimization (SEO). Incorporating SEO best practices will set your performance metrics up for success. Ignoring them will lead you to make easily avoidable mistakes.

Use an SEO analysis tool to get the full picture of your campaign results — ideally, one that looks at on-page, off-page, and technical SEO. This will keep you on the straight-and-narrow to satisfy search engines.

6. Start with optimized content

Performance monitoring isn’t an excuse to launch suboptimal content. If you know the ad copy is weak, don’t wait for your data to tell you.

Create the best content you can — and your performance monitoring results will just be fine-tuning.

Advantages of performance monitoring

Performance monitoring is essential for identifying areas for improvement and making data-driven decisions to optimize marketing campaigns. It’s the best way to pinpoint errors and weaknesses before they unravel your entire campaign.

Here are some of the reasons performance monitoring is so beneficial.

1. Performance monitoring enables data-grive decision-making
2. Improves cost-effectiveness
3. It enables a faster response to market changes
4. It calls out technical issues quickly
5. Performance monitoring makes it easy to understand where things go wrong
6. It has a positive impact on a variety of metrics

1. Performance monitoring enables data-grive decision-making

Guesswork will only get you so far. The best way to make your campaign a marketing success is to stay on top of what’s working at each moment.

Performance monitoring delivers real-time updates on dozens of marketing metrics, enabling you to make decisions based on actual data. By monitoring performance, you can identify which marketing channels drive the most traffic and where to allocate more resources.

2. Improves cost-effectiveness

Effective performance monitoring requires investing in tools and resources devoted to analysis — but the returns are undeniable.

Instead of allowing a suboptimal ad campaign to drain your marketing budget, you can see right away where you’re missing the mark. Your team can solve specific issues and prevent serious financial consequences — instead of throwing money at initiatives that won’t move the needle.

3. It enables a faster response to market changes

Customers and markets are changing faster than ever, and those evolutions are hard to stay on top of. But performance monitoring will clearly show you when a change has happened.

For instance, if your metrics suddenly begin underperforming after weeks of consistent growth, that’s a clear sign it’s time to reassess your campaign strategy and adapt.

4. It calls out technical issues quickly

Ad campaigns have many moving parts — so there are many places where technical issues can emerge.

Performance monitoring quickly detects when something goes wrong with your campaign. If your content is great, but your metrics are tanking, you may have a technical issue on your hands.

5. Performance monitoring makes it easy to understand where things go wrong

Some metrics tell you a lot about your buyers’ journey. For example, a high CTR paired with a high bounce rate indicates there’s an issue on your landing page. Low impressions paired with a high conversion rate could mean your target audience is off, but your ad content and CTA are spot on — so you’re gaining traction anyway.

Analyze your metrics as a group to gain more valuable insights than you could with a basic assessment of your metrics alone.

6. It has a positive impact on a variety of metrics

Performance monitoring can improve metrics across the board. Semrush states that performance monitoring improves SERPs, keyword optimization, and user alignment. It’s a powerful way to ensure your ad campaigns are as effective as possible — and that you’re not wasting money on channels that aren’t producing results.

Key metrics to monitor in your campaigns

Typically, you set campaign goals before you launch your campaign. Maybe you want to expand brand awareness. Maybe you want to drive more traffic to your site. Or maybe you’ve got an ideal CTR in mind.

Good campaign goals are measurable. The best way to monitor the performance of your ad campaign is by identifying your key performance indicators (KPIs).

Here are a few common KPIs you can use to set your campaign goals:

• Impressions: Looks at the total number of people who’ve seen your ad, enabling you to understand your ad’s reach and overall campaign awareness.
• Clickthrough rate (CTR): Tells you how many people clicked on your ad as a percentage of total impressions. It’s a great way to understand user engagement and intent, in addition to reach.
• Conversion rate: Percentage of people who interacted with your ad that completed a desired action, like buying a product or subscribing to a newsletter. Ad reach and engagement are great, but your ultimate goal is to get viewers to take action.
• Cost per acquisition (CPA): Measures the overall cost to acquire one paying customer. It’s a comprehensive metric that considers all the costs associated with your campaign, and helps you understand whether your campaign is profitable.
• Bounce rate: Tells you how many people only visited one page and then left, as a percentage of all visitors to your site. Looking at bounce rate gives you an idea of the effectiveness of your landing page or website.
• Return on ad spend (ROAS): The revenue you can attribute to your campaign divided by the cost of the campaign. It’s a great way to determine how successful your campaign is in generating revenue.

Of course, there are dozens of potential metrics your company can and should be monitoring, and this list is just a starting point.

For the most effective performance monitoring, focus on metrics that look at:

• Financial success
• Reach
• Engagement
• Funnel movement

Incorporating metrics that touch on different parts of your campaign’s effectiveness is key to optimizing your performance monitoring.

Common performance monitoring pitfalls

Let’s look at three common mistakes many digital marketers make with performance monitoring.

1. Overreliance on basic metrics

Technological advancements have given digital marketers a wealth of advanced metrics beyond CTR and CPA. If you only look at the basics, you’re missing out on deeper insights that could drive your campaigns to success.

2. Misattribution

Data plays a critical role in performance monitoring. But it requires interpretation. While some conclusions may jump off the page, your metrics should be the start of your investigation, not the end.

Mistaken attributions can result in serious resource drains. If you think your landing page copy is behind your tanked conversions, only to find out your site link is broken, you’ll waste time and money solving the wrong problem.

Once you’ve determined which metrics aren’t performing optimally, take time to investigate the cause. Jumping to conclusions is a surefire way to waste resources.

3. Overinvesting in tools

When you’re getting started with performance monitoring, you want to try every tool you can get your hands on. But disjointed tools will only cause confusion.

Take time to research which tools will best support your performance monitoring goals — and don’t overdo it. There are plenty of comprehensive tools that can provide all the insights you need in one spot.

These tools may require an investment, but it’s worth it to avoid unnecessary data confusion.

The takeaways

Campaign monitoring may seem complicated. But it can transform your entire approach to PPC advertising — and enable you to drive more conversions.

By making decisions based on data, you can garner a deeper understanding of what is and isn’t working in your digital advertising. It’s a powerful approach that can dramatically accelerate your PPC success.

If leveling up your PPC ads with monitoring sounds intimidating, consider contacting the PPC experts at HawkSEM. We take a performance-driven approach to optimizing your ads, always emphasizing your return on investments.

Book a call with our team and learn what HawkSEM can do for you.