Measuring the success of your auto repair shop’s marketing can be difficult if you don’t know what to look for. For all marketing campaigns, you should measure success on both macro (the end goal of your campaign) and micro conversions (actions that show your marketing is starting to work). Micro and macro conversions can be determined based on the type of marketing channel used: brand awareness or direct marketing.
Brand Awareness
Brand awareness campaigns consist of ads or collateral that aim to change the perception of your brand or drive website visitors to your site. These two metrics (brand perception and website visits) are the typical macro conversions for brand awareness campaigns. Brand awareness campaigns include display (banner ads), printed ads, and video ads. Measuring macro conversions for these campaigns can be tricky if you’re not equipped with the right tools.
Web analytics and survey tools can help you collect and organize this data if set up properly. Two free tools you can use to measure these conversions are Google Analytics and Survey Monkey. These tools are not only free but easy to set up and use.
When looking to analyze web traffic there are two metrics to keep track of: direct traffic and branded organic traffic (also known as searches). Direct traffic consists of users who directly type in the URL of your website to visit it while branded organic traffic is users who search on sites such as Google or Bing for your exact business name and find your website in the search results. Both organic and direct traffic is tracked in Google Analytics while organic search volume can be tracked in Google Search Consul, another free tool.
For brand awareness campaigns, micro conversions would consist of metrics such as impressions, which allow you to see exactly how far your ad reached. Typically, the ad platforms you use to run your ads will provide this data in the reporting section of the platform. An impression is the number of times your ad appears in front of users. For display ad campaigns these could reach as high as millions per month and are easily tracked, while an ad in a local paper might only gain a few thousand impressions and is virtually impossible to accurately track if you don’t know the readership count.
Direct Marketing
Direct marketing includes campaigns such as paid search, social ads, and email marketing. For these campaigns, the macro conversion is better known as return on investment (ROI). ROI is a very common measure of success for marketing campaigns as it directly ties and marketing costs to revenue generated. In terms of micro conversions, an increase in quality website visits shows you that your ads are reaching the right audience and compelling those users to click-through. Depending on the channel you are using for your campaign, you might use additional metrics as well. For example on social media campaigns, you might track the number of page/post likes, comments, and shares; for an email campaign the open rate (number of users who opened the email vs the number of users it was sent to) could also be a micro conversion. These are just a few examples of the many different micro conversions you might track for your campaigns.
Whether you’re just starting your marketing efforts, or looking to re-evaluate your existing campaigns, make sure to determine all your macro and micro conversions before starting so that you can effectively analyze success once your campaigns start running.
If you would like help determining which of your marketing channels are most successful, or just determining the macro and micro conversions you should track, reach out to our team at Conceptual Minds today.
