Tiffany St James is one of the UK’s most experienced digital transformation specialists, the founder of Transmute and former Head of Public Participation for the UK Government. She is also NDA’s monthly columnist.
Measuring the effectiveness of your campaign has never been more important.
In our current cost-conscious world, with tightening boundaries on budgets, programmes and scope, being able to differentiate your agency or organisation from the competition by how you measure the effectiveness of your campaign, and the impact you make has never been more prescient.
Do you have a measurement framework for your campaigns?
Do you know which measures matter most to your delivery and those which your clients are most interested in?
You may well have a framework; I hope you do. I also want you to consider reviewing your measures considering four areas that I’ll share here.
If you don’t have a measurement framework or are looking to extend how you offer more value to clients, here is a solid framework you can use. This has been built by the UK Government Communications Service and tweaked over the years to reflect newer digital metrics.
It can be adapted for digital and social media campaigns and easily mapped to stages in a customer journey.
The four areas are Outputs, Outtakes, Outcomes and Impact.
The first category is OUTPUTS
OUTPUTS are measured in awareness, reach, impressions and circulation figures only. This corresponds to the Awareness stage of a customer journey. You are not looking for any interaction here, just stating the larger figures of reach.
Specific measures can include social media impressions; an increase in social media channel reach month-on-month; banner advertising reach; newsletter circulation figures, event hashtag reach or volume of coverage. The reach is not limited to online; it also includes the number of organisations carrying your message and their reach in online and offline communications.
This list is not exhaustive but indicative of certain reach metrics.
These are generally your largest numbers, the vanity metrics and what most reports put first, they are not the most useful for you, but you should still seek to include them.
The second category is OUTTAKES
OUTTAKES are how your audiences react owing to your reach, distribution or exposure. This corresponds to consideration and active consideration in your campaign planning.
This can be expressed as sentiment, measuring an increase in positive sentiment owing to your communication.
The majority of outtakes are from digital interactions, but not exclusively so. The active interactions such as Likes, Shares, and Comments as well as the digital metrics of page views, bounce rates, dwell time, Click Through Rate or Viewing Time are the most common. Count here too the engagement rate, the percentage of your audience that was engaged or fan/follower growth directly attributed to the campaign as well as social media profile views.
Your outtakes may also be driving a digital action or interaction such as expressions of interest or a response rate such as the percentage of the audience that responded and signups to newsletters.
Most campaign frameworks account for outtake measures.
The third category is OUTCOMES
OUTCOME measures look at how your audience changed behaviour as a result of your communications. You might not always have access to OUTCOME data or it may not be collected as part of your campaign.
You may have Advocacy outcomes such as social media advocacy actions – the number of people using your campaign regalia, identity, badges or hashtags and voluntarily sharing, an increase in favourable ratings, pledges or recommendations.
You may have direct completion data such as the number of applications or registrations, applicant conversion ratio or the volume of sales made. Here you can look at your spend divided by specific activities to look at cost per spend per channel per activity. The common attributes are costs per download and/or completion, cost per applicant or cost per hire.
The fourth category is IMPACT
IMPACT can be both at an organisational or social impact level.
In campaign management, you may not see the final impact on the organisation or social impact of a campaign as they are not always measured or may not be shared with your part of the organisation.
Types of organisational impact measures are the number or percentage increase in complying actions, by a customer or a team; corporate reputation measures; cost reduction, for example in marketing or internal processes; customer retention and lifetime customer value.
It can also be the increase in, or adoption of, a new desired behaviour inside or outside of the organisation; the lowering of staff attrition rates and overall revenue or income to the business
Whilst none of these lists are exhaustive, looking at all four aspects of campaign measurement will give you more impactful measures. Do take a moment to review your campaign implementation plan and the measures against your activities.
