The election may be over, but your work as a digital campaigner continues. You now have a complete data set (not to mention the time) to analyze your campaign’s digital marketing performance.
According to the Pareto Principle, 20% of your efforts are responsible for 80% of your results. In the midst of a campaign, it can be difficult to isolate the contributing factors and there’s often a last minute rush to throw things against the wall to see what sticks. Now’s the time to take a step back and discover key lessons for your next campaign.
Here are some key after action analytics to study.
Website Traffic Sources
Your website is the only part of your campaign that should be working 24/7. It’s always on. It’s where voters are going to learn about your campaign as a first step to supporting you, volunteering, or donating.
With Google Analytics (which should always be installed on your campaign’s website) you can access the “Acquisition” report to see how visitors get to your website. What share of traffic came from Facebook? From email? From Google Search? This will give you a robust sense of what worked and what didn’t work in driving website visits.
If you were using UTM tracking codes for specific social posts, ads, or emails, you’ll have even better precision about what content successfully drove site traffic.
For your next campaign, think about which of these traffic sources you can grow. For example, if you didn’t see much search engine traffic, you can start working now on SEO. If Facebook drove more traffic than Instagram, outline strategies for cross promotion and getting more followers on Facebook from Instagram.
Social Analytics
Now’s the time to gain a new perspective on the impact of your campaign’s social media marketing. With social media, the most consequential metric is reach. How many users on Facebook and Twitter are seeing your posts daily, weekly, or monthly?
It’s easy to remember the ‘homerun’ posts that got higher than normal exposure, but the real work of campaigning on social media is creating content and engaging every day. By taking a holistic look at your social media performance, you’ll identify patterns that tell you more than simply how one specific post did.
YouTube
YouTube should be more than just a dumping ground for your campaign video. It’s the second largest search engine behind Google and voters turn here to learn more about the candidates on their ballots.
Thanks to search and the YouTube recommendation algorithm, a video you posted in spring of an election year could slowly amass views all the way to Election Day. Use these insights to find out what types of videos perform best.
Donor Cohort Analysis
With online fundraising, the day-to-day metrics are total amount raised and total donations, but these data points don’t provide much insight into what tactics worked and what didn’t. To understand that – and improve in the future – you need to perform a cohort analysis.
Cohort analysis seeks to answer the question of where and when did a donor first enter your online conversion funnel? When you know what worked best, you can repeat and improve.
To perform this analysis, you need to combine two data sources into a single spreadsheet. The first is a list of emails along with the source of their opt-in (i.e. which petition, form, or survey they completed) and when they signed up. Second is a list of donors with their emails and when they first donated.
Once combined, use a Pivot Table to match signup dates and sources to donation dates and amounts.
The campaign is over, but for those who take the time who dig into their data there are many more lessons to be learned.
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