[There are many simple ways to meaningfully boost your marketing, and we try to make our advice accessible to all. There are, however, a few important digital marketing steps that require a bit more technical knowledge, so if you’re happy to get your hands dirty, please read on]
Accurately tracking your performance is the key to first-rate digital marketing. You always need to know how many people are clicking on your ads and visiting your website. The good news is that there’s an essential piece of software that makes marketing measurement simple: Google Analytics.
Google Analytics gives you detailed information about how people use your site, creating thorough reports on everything from the number of visitors you’ve received in a particular time period to the exact amount of time they’ve spent on a specific page. If you want to know where your visitors come from, what ads have directed them and even their typical demographics, Google Analytics can quickly give you all this information, allowing you to take stock of your marketing efforts in real-time and adjust your strategy and practice.
Install your tracking tech
Tracking technology is the only way you can keep up with your campaign and make the changes you need to get the most value out of your budget.
Tracking apps take various forms, but Google Analytics is the really vital tool. You can make sure it is installed correctly by following these easy steps.
There are a few tricks you can use to make sure that Google Analytics works efficiently on your site. Firstly, you need to exclude yourself from the stats reports, so your own visits to your site don’t skew the data. Google explain how to do this here. If possible you should replace any email addresses on your website with contact forms, both to avoid spam and to build your database of leads; JPIMedia can help you do this.
If you are using banner or app adverts you can create a custom link back to your site via Google’s Campaign URL Builder. This will generate a customised, individual URL - more commonly known as a UTM link - so you can track all the information about each one of your ads separately.
All this information is a priceless resource. The more data you can access, the more you will understand your customers. While the scale of options available may seem daunting at first, the technology is so intuitive that you’ll quickly be up to speed with your stats.
Choose a Benchmark
Before you start tracking your website and ad activity, you’ve got to gather some initial data on where you stand, so you can compare your results later down the line and gauge your success.
Start off with stats like your monthly sales, enquiries, website hits and footfall. Without at least some of this information, you'll struggle to tell whether your marketing has made a difference, and where it is and isn’t working. Without a known baseline, your marketing and target-setting can never be properly efficient.
Choose your metrics
Even before deciding on benchmarks, you need to choose which factors have the biggest impact on your business, and which of them you want to measure. While it may be tempting to focus on the number of likes or retweets on social media, it’s normally more useful to track the number of visitors to your website, or the number of leads generated in a fixed period of time.
No one knows your business better than you, so you’re the person best equipped to decide its most significant indicators.
Set Your Goals
Once you've set up tracking and figured out what measurements to take, it's time to put everything into practice. Google Analytics should now give you live reports on your digital stats, and if you’ve scored a real hit with your marketing, like if a banner ad sends lots of clicks through to your site, you’ll be the first to know.
As this information comes in, you can monitor trends in real-time to inform how you set your own targets.
Understanding where your marketing is hitting the right notes is something both indispensable and satisfying to monitor. Now that you’ve got the technology, the right metrics and some achievable goals, you can start to grow your business.
If you want to find out more about practical ways to gauge your marketing performance, check out our new eBook: “Five key metrics to help you measure your online marketing efforts”.
