A radio station pitched our client a Facebook campaign this week.  My mind was blown that their only targeting included was people 18+ and the goal of the campaign (KPI Key Performance Indicator) was impressions.  Are those the right digital goals? In my opinion this is reminiscent of the campaigns that we ran in 2012 and I was shocked that someone would still be pitching this. 

The first question to ask when evaluating the success of your digital campaigns is are you setting yourself up for success?  Are you taking into account your ultimate goals for advertising?  In the vast majority of cases evaluating based off of clicks and impressions is Digital 1.0 and is best to leave in 2012.

The first step to define your right digital goals, are they:

–          Phone calls

–          Form submissions

–          Pages viewed

–          Time spent viewing your site

–          Subscriptions

–          Downloads

–          Signing up for email marketing lists

Once you have that goal its time to create a campaign to be evaluated based off of those actions.  If you are working with an outside vendor or agency ask them to set up goals / conversions to reflect these campaign goals.  It is easy for them to do in Google Ads & Analytics.  Make sure that they are reporting on these goals on a monthly basis.  If they refuse or don’t report on this, it may be a warning sign that you aren’t with the right partner.

If you are managing your own campaigns and don’t understand goals, its time to spend a few hours on Google.  Check out some tutorials on setting up goals in Google Analytics.  Learn to link your Google Analytics and Google Ads and set up your Facebook Pixel.  Don’t worry you don’t need to be a web developer to learn this, its actually pretty easy.

Then, after these goals are established make sure to track performance.  Don’t be afraid to try new things to become more efficient in your digital campaigns.  Use yourself as a benchmark and make sure your campaigns are serving your ultimate needs.  In the end you will receive a great deal of data to help in your business.  You will get an additional data point to measure seasonality and the effect competition in the marketplace.

Good luck in your new improved digital campaigns! Good luck in learning your right digital goals!