Every marketing team hopes that all their marketing efforts and plans are making progress to positively impact the business. When marketing efforts are successful, marketers are inspired to grow and improve their marketing efforts.
Excel spreadsheet is a popular tool for analyzing marketing data that can help marketers. Marketing sheets are great for managing sales leads and analyzing campaign performance. Excel spreadsheets can keep track of ROI to determine comparisons, gaps, and optimize your marketing campaigns.
This article discusses using Excel for marketing and analyzing campaign data and ROI. You will also learn how to compute the ROI using a spreadsheet and identify the different metrics for tracking marketing ROI.
Digital Marketing Campaigns
Marketers use marketing campaigns to promote their brand awareness. Traditional marketing includes print ads, billboards, and TV or radio advertisements.
However, in this day and age of technology and faster internet connectivity, marketing is shifting digitally. Digital marketing, compared to traditional marketing, is interactive, sustainable, and dynamic. Marketing channels for digital marketing campaigns include Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.
Digital marketing campaigns are strategic plans developed to achieve a goal. Often, these goals are to promote their brand and encourage paying customers. A successful digital marketing campaign involves three main steps – understanding your target audience, creating a marketing strategy, and executing the strategies.
What is ROI?
ROI or Return on Investment, is an investment measure that evaluates the profitability of an investment. This popular metric is simple and versatile. It shows how well your investment is performing.
For instance, you can talk about the ROI on an invested stock, an ROI in a real estate deal, or the ROI is a newly constructed manufacturing plant. The goal of ROI is to show a positive net result which means the investment or the deal is doing very well and profit is coming in.
Marketing Data: Computing ROI in Excel Spreadsheet
You can calculate the ROI using an Excel spreadsheet using the formula: ROI = (sales revenue – marketing cost) /marketing cost. You don’t have to compute the ROI manually. There is a marketing ROI calculator that can make your work easier.
Excel’s Marketing ROI calculator is a plug-and-play template. It is ready to use for both Windows and Mac. You can easily customize your reports with this template.
An ROI calculator takes into consideration five factors when computing. Below are the steps in computing the ROI using a spreadsheet.
1. Encode the Formula
Plugging in values to the formula is easy when you are doing it using pen and paper. It is a different story once you do it on a spreadsheet. When encoding a formula on a spreadsheet, you must identify the cells used for the formula to avoid errors and achieve correct results.
2. Add Variables
Add a row for sales revenue and a row for marketing costs in your spreadsheet. You should label two columns. The first column includes the label Simple ROI and the second, Results. The second column will reflect values for your sales revenue and marketing costs.
3. Apply the Formula
The next step is to encode the ROI formula on a free cell below the results column.
4. Calculate Return On Investment (ROI)
The formula will not automatically give you a result in percentage form. To change the format, click the Home tab > Number > Percentage.
5. Interpreting ROI
Once the spreadsheet has calculated the ROI, it is time to interpret the result and communicate it to your stakeholders. Everyone must know the company’s current investment status based on the calculated ROI. Data and results are meaningless if they are not interpreted and given context.
8 Metrics for Tracking Marketing ROI
You may need to use different marketing metrics to track ROI, for not all metrics are designed equally. Below are the common metrics used to track marketing ROI.
1. Reach
Reach is used to track spending on digital advertisements. Reach determines the number of people who have seen your marketing campaign content. Reach is an excellent metric to use if you are aiming to reach a large target audience and increase your brand awareness online.
2. Impressions
If you want to know how many times your online content has been viewed regardless of who the viewers are, use the Impressions metric. This metric can track results if your goal is constant and repeat exposure to your marketing campaigns.
3. Visits
Most businesses have websites which is an important marketing asset. A website contains all the important information about the company and its products or services. The goal of all businesses is to increase traffic to their website.
Each individual visiting the site causes traffic; each is a potential customer. Improving your website by redesigning it should be measured for ROI. Is the improved design attracting more customers or not?
4. Leads
If your marketing strategy is poorly thought out, getting leads is expensive. Knowing the ROI is important for lead acquisition to ensure that the Cost Per Lead aligns with the company’s profit goals.
Along with the sales team, it is a must to develop a Service Level Agreement. This Agreement identifies how much the marketing department can spend on leads vs. Customer Lifetime Value.
5. Conversion Rates
A conversion rate metric not only determines who viewed or how many viewed your website. It tracks the percentage of individuals visiting your site and interacting with your marketing assets. This means they are signing up for your newsletter, contacting customer service, or making a purchase.
5. ROAS (Return on Ad Spend)
ROAS is a metric determining if you efficiently spend money on paid advertisements. With the advancement in Internet connectivity, more businesses invest in paid digital advertisements like display ads, social media ads, and search ads.
ROI and ROAS have almost the same formula. Unlike ROI, which measures all marketing spend, ROAS only measures paid advertising expenditures.
8. Lead Close Rate
Lead Close Rate indicates the number of individual leads that became paying customers. This metric varies across various industries and campaigns. Hence, marketers don’t expect to have a 100% lead close rate, for only some people who visit your site become a customer.
If your site visitors are not returning for purchases, it is time to rethink your marketing strategies. Marketing gaps might have been overlooked during planning. It is time to assess your marketing campaigns to improve your lead close rate.
Maximize Your Marketing Efforts Using Spreadsheets!
Marketing campaigns can be successful using spreadsheets for data analysis and computing ROI. ROI calculations are easier using an ROI calculator template that you can use to make your work easier and faster.
Understanding ROI is important because businesses use the data from ROI calculations to make decisions and plan marketing strategies to promote brand awareness, increase site traffic, and improve customer leads.
