By: Elizabeth Coffey, Marketing G2 Digital Marketing Specialist

It’s no secret that marketing has undergone a huge transformation in the last decade due to the digital revolution. More and more of your available audience can be found and captured online, but before you dive headfirst into the murky world of digital marketing, it’s important to know exactly what matters to your publication. How does your publishing company define success?

Vanity metrics like impressions, shares, and likes may be appealing because they’re easy, are familiar (similar to traditional marketing), and provide marketers (and their managers) with immediate gratification. They don’t, however, give you an accurate picture of how your digital marketing campaigns are performing.

To make sure your marketing campaigns are driving subscription sales (a common way to define conversion within the publishing industry) with the lowest possible cost-per-acquisition, focus on performance-driven metrics, metrics that are closely related to revenue and ROI.

1. Optimize your digital marketing campaigns – Efficiency is important when it comes to running a successful online campaign. Embrace the 80/20 rule that 80% of your revenue will come from 20% of your online marketing activities. Hone-in on what campaigns seem to be working and put effort into improving those campaign metrics.
   
   Don’t target users you know will never subscribe and instead focus your efforts around those types of users that you’ve had success converting in past. This reduces costs and saves resources.
   
   Also, tracking campaign conversions daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and well into the future is important to come up with the true ROI of your digital marketing efforts (your sales cycle may be longer than you think).


2. Get the right technology to track attribution – Do you know which campaign gets credit for which conversion? The right tech can make all the difference and allow you to see your customer’s journey from campaign to click to subscription sign up.


3. Re-target and re-engage your customers – Today’s digital media audience must be re-targeted and re-engaged to drive revenue. No longer can you set-it-and-forget-it when it comes to your online marketing efforts and a one-time interaction is unlikely to yield measurable results. Engagement technology, like MG2 ConneXt, can help you create custom conversations between you and your users increasing your overall conversion rate. Building a lasting relationship between your publication and its audience has never been more important.

What campaign metrics are you measuring at your media company?