How to Measure Marketing Performance? [2024]

Digital marketing goes beyond mere creativity. You must know which efforts and strategies support your marketing performance and which only generate unnecessary costs and waste time. And that’s the point of this article!

Marketing performance is a process of measuring the effectiveness of marketing efforts in achieving assumed goals. It involves tracking and analyzing various marketing metrics and key performance indicators.

Table of contents:

• What is marketing performance?
• How to measure marketing performance?
• Tip: Benchmark the performance
• Conclusion

What is marketing performance?

Marketing performance means tracking and analyzing the effectiveness and results of your marketing actions. It determines how well your efforts help achieve the goals you set. 

So, in other words, marketing performance is all about checking how the reality meets expectations.

In practice, measuring marketing performance requires using various KPIs (key performance indicators) and metrics, such as brand mentions, ROI (return on investment), conversion rate, share of voice, and so on.

Of course, marketing performance is all about finding the spaces for improvement.

Measuring marketing performance is necessary to:

• Discover the top-performing strategies to boost the cost-effectiveness of your marketing;
• Understand the customer behavior to adjust communication and marketing strategies;
• Benchmark your current performance with industry competitors;
• Identify your competitive advantages and expose them publicly.

How to measure marketing performance?

To measure marketing performance, you need to track:

1. Social media and non-social reach
2. Conversion Rate
3. Return on Investment (ROI)
4. The volume of mentions 
5. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
6. Share of voice
7. SEO metrics
8. Presence Score
9. Reputation Score
10. Sentiment 
11. Geo analysis

01 Social media and non-social reach

Reach is one of the most critical marketing performance metrics, showing how viral your marketing efforts are.

It indicates the estimated number of people that could have contact with your brand, hashtag, and digital marketing campaign.

The reach refers to both social media and non-social sources, such as news sites, blogs, podcasts, and so on.

The more people will have contact with your campaign or brand, the higher your brand visibility & brand awareness are.

All in all, marketing is a game of numbers.

Thanks to measuring social media and non-social reach, you will find out:

• Which marketing channels bring you the most awareness and boost your recognizability;
• What type of content resonates most with your audience;
• The seasonability patterns in your niche.

Okay, but how can you measure this metric in practice?

It’s pretty simple when it comes to the social media reach.

All the major apps, such as Instagram and TikTok, have native analytic tools.

So, the best you can do is to start from the first-party data & analytics features.

But how about non-social reach?

Well, it’s a bit more complicated.

Non-social reach refers to all the sources that aren’t social media platforms. These are news sites, blogs, videos, podcasts, forums, and review sites.

Thankfully, there are tools powerful enough to gather, process, and analyze data from multiple sources.

A great example is Brand24.

This media monitoring & social listening tool allows you to measure online marketing performance by tracking multiple metrics, including social & non-social reach.

Brand24 tracks public mentions from:

• Social media: Facebook, X (Twitter), Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn, Reddit, Quora, and Twitch;
• Non-social sources: websites, blogs, podcasts, videos, forums, and news sites.

Let me show you an example.

Below, you can see the chart presenting the reach of the GoPro brand. Yes, I mean the company producing sports cameras.

Brand24 offers multiple AI-powered features that boost your analytics of the reach metric.

For example, you can use the AI Metrics Analysis to discover the top sources for reach and reach efficiency.

In the case of GoPro, TikTok generates the most reach, whereas forums are the most reach-efficient sources.

Each GoPro mention on forums reaches 13.7K people on average.

02 Conversion Rate

Conversion rate is one of the most frequently used indicators to track the performance of nearly every marketing action.

Long story short: conversion rate counts how many percent of people who had contact with your campaign or brand turned into paying customers.

First, you must define your conversion (so the desired action). It can be a product purchase, newsletter sign-up, starting a free trial, etc.

Once your conversion is defined, you simply do a simple maths.

If the total number of people exposed to your brand (i.e., website traffic) is 200, and 10 of them make a conversion (i.e., signed up to your newsletter), the conversion rate would be (10/200) × 100 = 5%.

The higher the conversion rate, the more money-efficient your marketing strategy is.

03 Return on Investment (ROI)

ROI. Three letters that give marketers sleepless nights.

In short, return on investment is a metric that measures profitability. It presents the percentage return on the money spent (the investment).

You calculate it by subtracting the money you earned from the money you spent. Later, you divide it by the cost of investment (so the total money spent). You multiply the result by 100. Complicated?

This simple example will make you understand it easily.

Imagine you spend $100 on social media advertising, i.e., Facebook ads. This campaign brought you three customers who purchased products for $160.

In this case, the ROI would be 60%. How?

$160 (the money earned) – $100 (the money spent) = $60

ROI = (100/60​) × 100% = 60%

04 The volume of mentions

The volume of mentions is a digital marketing metric showing how often your brand name was used.

To put it even more simply, the volume of mentions indicates how often people talk about your marketing campaigns, brand, or to perform a hashtag analysis.

Understanding this metric is crucial for measuring your marketing performance because it informs you about the number of online conversations regarding your brand, including the segmentation to particular platforms.

Thanks to tracking the volume of mentions, you will find out:

• Which platform is your top source of mentions;
• What topics encourage your audience to talk about your brand;
• Boosting your SEO by identifying possible backlink cooperation opportunities.

The best way to track mentions is – again – by using a professional media monitoring tool.

When you jump to AI Metrics Analysis, just scroll down. You’ll discover the chart presenting your top mentions sources.

Regarding GoPro mentions volume, the undisputed number 1 is Instagram.

05 Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

Customer lifetime value is one of the most interesting metrics for measuring your digital marketing strategy.

It represents the total amount of money a company can expect to earn from a single customer throughout the entire relationship.

CLV = Average Order Value × Number of Repeat Sales × Average Retention Time

Imagine the following situation.

You owe an e-commerce company that sells only ayurvedic hair conditioners. Each product costs $40.

Your customer purchases a hair conditioner every two months (so six times a year) and remains your customer for three years. In this case, the CLV would be the following.

CLV = $40 × 6 × 3 = $720

Okay, but what do you need CLV for?

It is a super helpful metric in understanding the economic value a customer brings over his “lifetime” of interacting with your brand.

Simply put, CLV changes how you look at customer acquisition.

Instead of wondering how to acquire many customers at the lowest cost, you optimize spending by attracting the most valuable customers.

06 Share of voice

Share of voice (SOV) is a benchmarking metric. It measures your total brand visibility against your competitors, giving you an overview of your brand’s position in your niche.

No brand exists in the vacuum.

Understanding your SOV allows you to identify your brand’s position in the industry, compare your marketing performance with the others, and track the impact of your marketing campaigns.

Thanks to measuring the share of voice, you will find out:

• How successful your organic PR activities are, i.e., guest articles in prominent niche media;
• Which channels work in your favor, and which should you improve;
• Which tactics work for your competitors?

If you want to get seriously into marketing performance measurement, start tracking your share of voice.

AI-powered tools like Brand24 can quickly assess the SOV thanks to tracking mentions.

The example?

I compared GoPro’s share of voice with DJI – a company known for producing video drones and sports cameras.

The analysis proves that GoPro has about twice as high total SOV as its competitor.

However, when you filter the view to non-social media sources, the share of voice is going nearly head-to-head.

07 SEO metrics

SEO metrics are a group of indicators that give you insights into your website & content quality.

Thanks to them, you can understand what problems your customers face when visiting your website, adjust your content marketing efforts, and build brand visibility & expertise in a given field.

Okay, I know it’s tricky. SEO is such a huge marketing discipline that it should require a separate article. But my point is to signal its importance in the case of marketing performance.

Because you can’t correctly judge your efforts regarding brand awareness, advertising campaigns, and promotional actions without considering search engine optimization.

The top SEO metrics are:

• Organic traffic
• Traffic sources
• Keyword rankings
• SERP visibility
• Bounce rate
• Session duration
• Page speed
• Backlinks profile
• Top performing content

If you want to start measuring your SEO metrics, you should implement Google Analytics and Google Search Console on your website.

More advanced data require access to professional tools, such as Ahrefs, Semrush, or Moz. However, if you’re looking for a tool for backlinks monitoring, Brand24 is a perfect match!

08 Presence Score

Presence Score is the type of metrics marketing companies love because it lets you rate your performance marketing strategy almost instantly.

In short, the Presence Score indicates your online exposure and popularity at a given time.

Thanks to measuring Presence Score, you will find out:

• If your brand awareness is on an upward or downward trend;
• How significant impact did a given event have on the popularity of your brand;
• If you should evaluate your PR strategy.

Let’s go back to our GoPro case study.

As you see below, the brand has a pretty stable Presence Score. However, we can observe a slow regressive trend (from 75 to 72).

If I were GoPro’s PR manager, I would now invest in a brand awareness campaign to avoid further popularity drop.

09 Reputation Score

Reputation Score is an exciting marketing performance metric summarizing one of the most crucial things online: brand perception.

In the blink of an eye, you can check if people have mostly positive or negative emotions towards your brand.

Because the Reputation Score is a numerical value that presents your overall online reputation. The score reveals the level of credibility and trust toward a brand, person, campaign, hashtag, or topic.

Thanks to measuring Reputation Score, you will find out:

• How is your brand perceived compared to your competitors;
• Which actions brought you a positive or negative reception;
• If your current brand marketing strategy supports or harms your reputation.

GoPro’s Reputation Score is definitely positive. Even more – it’s constantly improving!

It’s evidence that the brand’s PR strategy based on sharing exciting user-generated content is totally correct.

GoPro, you rock!

10 Sentiment 

Speaking about reputation

we can’t omit its foundation:

the sentiment behind each mention.

~ William Shakespeare (joke)

Sentiment analysis is the process of discovering feelings associated with the published text.

In other words, you can automatically determine if people talk about you positively, negatively, or neutrally.

Knowing the details about what emotions your brand generates is crucial for your marketing performance.

With that knowledge, you can identify potential brand crises, address people’s anger, and discover your top marketing channels.

Thanks to sentiment monitoring, you will find out:

• Which social media platforms bring you positive PR;
• How does your target audience react to your various marketing strategies;
• Where should you pivot your efforts to avoid a potential brand crisis.

Tracking sentiment is extremely easy if you use the appropriate tool.

Brand24 allows you to check the feelings toward your brand in real-time.

You can apply various filters to discover the sentiment behind mentions shared on particular social media platforms regarding the topic you’re interested in or by choosing only positive/negative mentions.

GoPro’s sentiment chart proves that this brand is doing great. Negative mentions are the vast minority!

Need more details regarding emotions?

No worries, AI will take care of that!

Just go to the Metrics Analysis tab and check which feelings dominate your top marketing performance channels, which are the source of negativity, and so on.

GoPro is doing very well!

11 Geo analysis

Last but not least, to fully understand your marketing performance, you should know your brand mentions geographical distribution.

Geo analysis shows the worldwide presence and popularity of your brand. It reflects which countries are your top markets and informs you about your local marketing efforts’ success (or failure).

Thanks to conducting geo analysis, you will find out:

• How to adjust your communication, i.e., by adding new languages to your website;
• When to post your content to reach the most people from your target audiences;
• How to utilize local holidays to spread your message, i.e., Diwali in India or Eid al Fitr in Muslim countries.

Regarding GoPro, the top 4 countries regarding mentions volume, reach, and interactions are the United States, United Kingdom, India, and Canada.

This means that English-speaking countries are the brand’s most important target audience.

Tip: Benchmark the marketing performance

Understanding your marketing performance requires a reference point. That should always be your no-brainer.

All in all, if you don’t compare your present performance with the past (or with other players from your field), how would you know you’re doing right?

Therefore, to stay up to date, I really recommend you systematically benchmark your marketing performance.

The main benefits of benchmarking marketing performance:

• You can easily identify your strengths and weaknesses to find a path to improve your performance;
• By tracking your competitors, you can inspire yourself & implement their good practices to enhance your market presence.

The table below unveils that GoPro is doing slightly worse than in the previous period. Right, the brand’s performance is still awe-inspiring. At least for now.

However, the significant drop in mentions volume and reach signals that GoPro should seriously consider launching a brand awareness campaign.

Conclusion

Let’s make it clear: you can’t succeed in marketing without measuring its performance. It’s simply ineffective, unprofitable, and thus – impossible. No one will pay for fruitless marketing.

If you imagine marketing as a poker game, each use of a marketing performance metric is calling cards. But in this case, it’s better not to bluff!

So, except for living in a fantasyland, focus on mastering marketing performance metrics.

Know them, understand them, and apply them to your everyday work.

They can be your best friends, guiding you through the complicated marketing world, showing you the right paths, and turning you away to avoid wrong decisions.

Or simply reduce the costs of mistakes that are ultimately inevitable.

• Measuring marketing performance means verifying if your actions meet the assumed expectations.
• With the support of an appropriate tool for social listening, you can take your marketing performance analysis to the highest level possible.
• The quantity & quality of your brand mentions should go hand in hand. “Say anything you want about me, as long as you spell my name right” is a wrong approach.

Are you ready to track your marketing performance like a pro? Try Brand24 for free!