Digital Marketing has a dilemma.

Campaigns nowadays have so much data behind them, it can be difficult to see the impact your campaign is having without going into a rabbit hole of data and analytics. Here are my 5 strategies to help you see the forest from the trees.

In this approach, the only metrics that matters are number of leads. With this strategy, two conclusions can be inferred from any given campaign:

low leads from target but high conversion rate = a bad campaign with good sales process.

high leads exceeding target but low conversion rate = a good campaign with bad sales process.

Existing in such binary states is useful because it lets you remove the decision fatigue out of the campaign. The downside is that campaigns do not really exist in binary states, and every campaign’s success is relative. This is popular with most service-based companies .

In the world of hits, click-thru, eyeballs and all the other fancy words that mean “amount of times people looked at this digital product”, channel-based ROI matters a lot. For media companies in particular, the amount clicks a piece of content gets, and subsequently the amount of click-thrus it garners is a direct impact on the bottom line.

In this world, likes, shares, comments, tags etc are the difference between a profitable piece of content or a loss-leader . This is essentially the way most media companies function.

Source performance is a measure of core search elements like SEO rank for hits, and SEM campaign results. Though it is an inexact science, the core element of source measured performance is the measure of organic vs inorganic avenues for leads. For businesses that have a large online presence and rely on content marketing, source performance allows them to see which avenues are the most profitable. SEO ranking is rarely a free ride, and it is important to see how well SEO performs alongside SEM.

Companies with a high Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) often rely on this method.

Campaign performance is slightly different, in that it recognises the relative performance of a campaign as being more relevant to metrics than the channel itself. For instance, a company could engage in an SEO campaign and achieve only a few leads, with a social media content campaign achieving many more leads. The SEO content campaign could however achieve a much higher conversion rate, and result in direct revenue for the business far beyond the social campaign due to various nuances within the channel, or content relevance. This type of ROI measuring has only become a recent trend, but is starting to be more widely adopted in the industry.

Goal based performance is the simplest ROI measure. Creating a campaign towards a more targeted goal is perhaps the most complicated result to achieve. For this type of campaign monitoring, the company simply sets a revenue growth target, and doesn’t really care how it gets there. For companies that use the same types of campaigns year on year, such as catalogues, white papers or even just simple billboards, the idea that it may grow revenue on the back of simply spending more money on the same campaign is simple enough, but relies on clever manipulations to make it work successfully.

This type of ROI performance is popular with certain large, publicly listed companies, who have targets set for them by analysts in the market. Whether it actually works is another thing entirely.

Measuring the ROI of a campaign is an inexact science. These 5 strategies are popular in the industry, but can be mixed and matched depending on the circumstances.