While marketing is an excellent way of reaching your customers and making more sales, it’s much less effective if you don’t track your results. Tracking your marketing strategy is the best way to know what’s working and what isn’t. Then, you can tweak your strategy so that your marketing hits the spot even more.

Of course, analytics can be a tricky business. If you’re a bit uncertain when it comes to marketing analytics, join us as we take a look at how to examine and take action on your data.

Why Tracking Your Marketing Efforts Is So Important

You can’t succeed with digital marketing if you don’t measure your results. Whether you’re measuring organic traffic or Facebook ad clicks, measuring your results is the difference maker between your business remaining in the online shadows or being more visible to the right people.

For example, you could track your marketing analytics on social media to find trends that help you create a better strategy. Or, you might find that by getting more granular with your data, you’re able to identify exactly why your website experienced a sudden surge in traffic over the last month.

These are just two examples but the possibilities are endless. The overall benefit is that tracking your marketing efforts allows you to understand more about your customers and the platforms you’re using so that your strategy is better targeted and more rewarding.

Plus, it saves you a heck of a lot of time from making the same mistakes over and over again.

How To Track Your Marketing Efforts

Pick The Channels You Want to Track

Channels (or subgroups) make it much easier to measure the success of your marketing efforts. As opposed to, you know, trying to measure everything all at once.

Here are some of the most popular channels you can track:

Direct - This is when a customer arrives on your website of their own volition. In other words, without a third party directing them there. Perhaps they saw your website in a newsletter and typed it into their address bar

Referral - This is when customers are referred to your website by a third party, such as another website you’ve written content for. Referral traffic is crucial because it often brings a highly targeted audience to your page. To make it effective while running referral programs, you should also remember to master the referral message. This will increase your chances of conversions.

Organic - This is traffic derived from search engines, such as Google, and which you might use long tail keywords to generate. Having solid keyword research and link building strategy in place can be game-changers when it comes to generating organic traffic to your website

Paid - This when customers click on your paid ad, such as on Google. You can learn how to do PPC (pay-per-click) advertising yourself, or hire an expert to help you out. You can use a platform like UpCity to find a PPC specialist that will help you get your paid advertising up and running

Social - This is when people arrive on your website via a social media platform, like Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. You shouldn’t also forget to stay active on Reddit and Quora which can bring tons of relevant traffic to your website. To track your efforts you can use various social media management tools that have analytics feature built-in

Pick The Metrics You Want To Measure

Once you’ve chosen the channels, you then need to choose the metrics you’ll be measuring. It’s these metrics that will show you what your ROI is, and they will also give you more perspective on how well your marketing campaign is performing.

Here are some metrics to choose from:

Web content

How effective are your headlines, images, copy, and call to actions at getting people to convert? Did you put in place a solid content marketing plan and are adjusting it based on the results you are seeing? Understanding the basics of copywriting and measuring what works and what doesn’t can take your business to another level.

Lead conversion

This is all about the customer journey. The metric allows you to track a customer from the initial point of contact, right through to conversion. It also shows you what barriers are preventing them from converting (drop-off points in the customer journey)

Click-through rate

This metric can show you how many people visited a particular page, as well as what they did next. For example, did they click again, or did they bail out?

Bounce rate

If people are clicking on your website but instantly bailing out, it means your content isn’t meeting their expectations. This is when your bounce rate soars and your ranking plummets. To fix it, your approach to content marketing must change.

The good starting point is to understand how to create a high quality, evergreen content and get it in front of the right audience.

Add a UTM Source Code To Your URL

Learning where your links are clicked will really help you with your marketing efforts. And one of the easiest ways to find this information is with the Urchin Tracking Module by Google (or UTM).

UTM allows you to add a tiny bit of text to the end of your link URL and Google will then go ahead and track it. This will let you find out the number of people who came to your site (or a particular page) from a particular social platform.

It’s a simple metric - but a really important one. And it’s really simple to use UTM. All you need to do is add a text like the following to the end of your link for Facebook:

http://mysite/com/SEO-tips?src=facebook

You would do the same for Instagram and Twitter and so on.

You can go further by tracking different headlines to find out which ones bring the most traffic.

Best Tools To Use To Track Your Marketing Efforts

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free tool that many online marketers use. It lets you see many things including your UTM links (see above).

To see these links, click “Acquisitions” followed by “All Campaigns.” Here, you’ll get access to each campaign you’ve run so far, which means you can see exactly how many people clicked on the link for each particular one.

Not just this, but you’ll also discover the number of pages they visited, as well as how long they stuck around - and much more.

KissMetrics

KissMetrics is designed to help you bring more high converting traffic to your website. Its basic plan starts out from $30 a month, but you can pay as much as $1000 per month if your website grows and grows.

As well as showing you how to track your conversions, the tool also shows you how well each traffic is performing, as well as where most of your traffic is coming from.

Nightwatch.io

Nightwatch is perfect if you would like to have an in-depth analysis of the SEO efforts. For that purpose, you can use this rank tracking software designed for those who love details and complete control over their data. 

You can have a free 7-day trial or choose a starter packet which is now 19$ per month.

RapidMiner

RapidMiner is a modern-day analytics platform - and it’s one of the best around. Especially when it comes to machine learning, predictive analysis, and data mining.

The basic plan is free, and with features like predictive modelling, RapidMiner is able to provide you with very helpful, very accurate data.

Conclusion

Guesswork will get you nowhere online in 2019. Instead, you need to put into place a strong marketing campaign that you then measure. It’s only by measuring your campaign that you can tweak it to make it even better. And it’s then when things will really take off for you.

So identify the channels and metrics you want to measure, and download the right tools that will help you along the way.