What is a campaign analysis report?
A campaign analysis report uses Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to measure the success of a marketing campaign.
Given that marketing campaigns come in many different forms there isn’t one standard way to conduct a campaign analysis report. Depending on your campaign objectives, you’ll need to source and gather data from varying channels.
In this blog, we’ll cover commonalities and popular sources of data to help you conduct and present your report.
Steps to creating a campaign analysis report
1. Identify your objectives
This step should start well before you begin analysing the success of your campaign. You should have identified your objectives right at the origination of your campaign. What was your aim? Here are some common examples:
- Boost brand awareness
- Boost awareness of a new product or service
- Improve brand sentiment
- Drive more traffic to the website
- Generate leads
- Expand into a new market
- Increase loyalty
- And, of course, increase sales
Most likely, your campaign will have more than one objective, or your main objective may have secondary effects, impacting other channels. For example, your main objective may have been to boost brand awareness, but did your social media campaign also drive more traffic to your website?
Think laterally to consider what might be impacted and clearly define your objectives to help you with the next step.
2. Identify your KPIs
Which key metrics will illustrate the success (or otherwise) of your campaign? Traditionally, KPIs for digital marketing campaigns were taken from structured data. For example, number of leads, average selling price, cost per lead, click-through rates, total traffic etc. Or else qualitative data had to be gathered using surveys and interviews – requiring time-consuming analysis.
Now, thanks to social media, review sites and advancements in Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology, with tools such as the Symanto Insights Platform, you can unlock useful and detailed metrics in unstructured qualitative data that already exists online. For example, brand sentiment about a particular feature or function of a product, brand mentions, Net Promoter Score, etc.
3. Gather and analyse your data
Depending on your KPIs, relevant data will lie across several channels. You can use tools and platforms to help you gather and analyse data and convert it into easy-to-understand data visualisations. Here are some examples:
Google Analytics will help you gather data regarding traffic and click-throughs. Google Analytics makes it easy to track the provenance of traffic so that you can identify exactly what is driving people to your website. This is particularly useful if you’re running several campaigns simultaneously with the same destination URL.
SEO tools such as SEMrush and Ahrefs enable you to easily track both paid and organic traffic. Find out where your pages rank on Google, and which page searchers are directed to.
The Symanto Insights Platform gathers, analyses and interprets qualitative data from social media, review sites, and online surveys. It is connected to 75+ online channels including Facebook, Twitter, Trustpilot, Google and Amazon. It is also connected to popular online survey platforms Survey Monkey and Typeform.
The Symanto Insights Platform can gather and analyse thousands of data entries within minutes. It tracks brand mentions, sentiment, and even the personality traits of consumers writing about your brand online.
You can also upload customer service correspondence or phone transcripts into the Symanto Insights Platform from your CRM database for analysis. Speaking of which…
CRM databases capture data such as order history, customer communications, customer demographics and lead scoring. If your objective is to increase customer loyalty, or reach a new audience, CRM databases are a useful source of data.
4. Visualise your data
Most tools and platforms that track and gather data will also provide you with data visualisations. Make sure that they are intuitive, and clearly convey what you want to take away from the post-campaign analysis.
5. Evaluate elements of the campaign
The results are in. How did you fare? Did you meet your campaign objectives? What worked well? What needs improvement?
Get feedback and suggestions from team members and other key stakeholders. Consider conducting surveys and interviews on your target audience about their impression of your campaign.
- Here are some example questions to ask target consumers:
- What do you think about this campaign?
- How does the campaign make you feel?
- What message do you think we are trying to deliver?
- Has your perception of our company changed after seeing this campaign?
- Will you purchase our company’s product?
- What do you like / dislike about the campaign?
6. Present your report
Now comes the nerve-wrecking time to present your campaign analysis report to your boss. Here are some key tips.
- Summarise the outcome of the marketing campaign at the beginning of the presentation. Don’t build up to a big reveal. Whether positive or negative, let the outcome prime the audience for constructive discussions.
- Be direct, honest and upfront. You’ll come off better acknowledging the weaknesses of the campaign rather than trying to sugar-coat the truth. Honesty shows that you are learning and progressing.
- Transform shortcomings into valuable learnings and recommend next steps. How will you action what you have learnt from this campaign? Use the insights you gathered from team members and customers to help you.
- Explain the wins too. If your campaign was an out and out success, congratulations! You still need to evaluate and explain why it was so successful so that you can apply the same methodology or principles in future.
In summary
Your campaign analysis report must be driven by objective data. Depending on your campaign objectives you’ll need to use multiple sources to give you a broader view of your campaign and provide valuable and actionable insights for you to learn from and consider in your next campaign.
Find out more about how the Symanto Insights Platform is assisting marketing teams worldwide by getting in contact or book your free personlised demonstration.
