GOALS & OBJECTIVES

Part 1

In order for a business to track campaign performance or website performance it is important to set specific goals that the company is trying to achieve. Every company sets different objectives that will help to accomplish their goals. Some companies may choose to run a campaign with the goal to improve SEO ranking for their website so it would show up on the first page of an organic search. Others may choose a goal to increase sales. They may choose to write a blog about their business in order to educate people about products or services that they offer and incentivize readers to make purchases. It is important to set SMART (specific, measurable, applicable, realistic, time-oriented) objectives in order to achieve certain goals. How do we know if our objectives are SMART? By following these steps:

·      Specific – when running a campaign or writing a blog, companies should determine what they are trying to achieve from these activities. For example, if a tour company wants to increase sales by running an ad campaign they should be specific about the desirable outcome, such as “increasing the number of summer tour sales by 20%” compared to previous summer sales. They should also specify the time in which they will strive to get desirable results. 

·       Measurable – how is the company going to measure the success of a campaign? Numeric or descriptive measurements should be considered and applied to measure the success of an ad, blog page, campaign or website performance. What can we measure? E-commerce websites can measure percent of the sales increase, blog pages can measure the amount of viewers on the page and links to their page, social media campaigns can measure ‘likes’, ‘shares, ‘engagement rate’, and ‘traffic to companies websites.’