There is no sense in spending thousands of dollars on marketing efforts if a company doesn’t properly track and analyze what is and isn’t working. Every marketer needs to be able to deliver reports showing the successes and failures of their campaigns, otherwise the company will have no data to base future techniques and strategies on. Tracking helps to determine what marketing to cut and what to put more energy and funds behind. Top companies and marketers are well versed in all of these tracking efforts and the rest of the group is trying to catch up.
What Marketers Have in their Bag of Tricks
- Attribution Tracking: The latest advancement in marketing tracking is to attribute a conversion to different stages in the marketing funnel. One conversion can be attributed to a banner ad in ad networks, an organic search phrase, engagement on social media, and an email campaign. Marketers used to claim one of those campaigns was solely responsible for the conversion, but now they can see how a lead engages with several campaigns and eventually converts. This helps to show the value of a banner ad that may have been viewed but not clicked or emails that were clicked through but didn’t result in an immediate conversion.
- URL Tracking: Google URL builder has been around for a long time but many companies still don’t use it (or similar tools) to accurately track their campaigns. When creating an ad or link, the marketer can define the source, campaign, medium, content, and much more. This is extremely useful for A/B testing and quickly measuring a campaign’s performance in Google Analytics.
- Google Analytics Goals: Analytics can do a lot of the work for the marketer if they set up strong goal conversion tracking before launching campaigns. They can see what sources lead to the highest goal conversion rate and focus more efforts around those sources. Assigning a dollar value to each goal will help to create a quick picture of the ROI of a campaign too—something managers love to see.
- Keyword Tracking: When a user searches for a keyword and ends up on a business’s website, they can start to be tracked. They probably won’t convert on the first visit, but through remarketing efforts a company can put ads and content in front of that user related to their search term. Understanding what keywords result in the highest engagement and conversions will dramatically change how a company approaches future keyword optimization.
- Phone Tracking: A few years ago, tracking phone calls was an advanced tactic. Now, several providers can offer unique phone numbers that dynamically generate or a marketer can use one specific phone number for an entire campaign to differentiate the leads and conversions from other marketing efforts.