5 Ways to Track the Success of Your Digital Marketing

It’s incredibly important to have a strong marketing strategy. It is equally important to be able to track your marketing plan to maximize your results.

Marketing tracking is a vital piece of the puzzle, and while it might not be as “fun” as some of the more creative planning and execution stages of your strategy, it is imperative to understand what is and is not working in order to avoid wasted dollars.

Why Do I Need Marketing Tracking?

Simply put, you need to know where to spend your money. It’s common for business owners to cast a wide net in their initial marketing plan, throwing everything they can against the wall to determine what sticks. But, if you’re throwing money at print ads, Google AdWords, and SEO and getting virtually nothing from the print ads, then you can re-strategize and split the money you were spending amongst your two profitable marketing ventures.

Continuing to throw money at a marketing strategy that is not generating conversions is akin to taking a stack of cash and lighting it on fire. You want to use marketing capital to feed the strongest returns so that you can reap the maximum benefits. But the only way you can possibly know where to funnel your funds is with tracking.

Check out these five ways to track the success of your marketing campaign.

1. Website Analytics

I’ll start with the easiest and most common method of tracking, website analytics. Utilizing this tracking method, you can see who is coming to your site and from what sources. This lets you know which marketing tactics are producing the largest number of clicks and how many of those clicks convert to either sales or leads.

Some platforms like WordPress do have their own tracking systems built in but I highly recommend that you set up Google Analytics for your website. It is the most effective and thorough tracking tool around and is fairly easy to set up yourself by pasting a tracking code into the back end of your website and landing pages. Google Analytics compiles data for you in an easily manageable way and makes it possible to track the success of your marketing.

2. Ad Network Conversion Tracking

All ad networks, including Google AdWords, Facebook Ads, Bing Ads, etc. provide the ability to set up conversion tracking. This is critical because conversion tracking shows how effective your campaign is performing in areas such as phone calls, website purchases, newsletter sign-ups, app downloads, and more.

3. Phone Tracking

It’s always wonderful when the phone at your business is ringing off the hook. But where are all these calls coming from? How are people finding you? If you have no idea, or simply rely on your receptionist to ask, “Where did you hear about us,” you’re missing out on some valuable information that can maximize your marketing budget.

Call tracking is one of the the most effective ways to make use of one of your best lead generation sources. According to Grasshopper, 65% of Fortune 500 companies say that their highest quality lead source is phone calls, and a whopping 61% of local mobile searches result in a phone call. By taking advantage of call tracking technology, you’re able to figure out what marketing ventures are generating the highest number of phone calls.

Phone tracking uses Dynamic Number Insertion, or DNI for short, to assign different phone numbers to different visitors based on the source that they used to find you. Someone who clicked through to your website from Facebook, for instance, would call a different phone number than someone who found you through a Google Ad. This gives you the opportunity to keep track of who is calling from where and gauge where your budget is best spent.

4. CRM Tracking

A CRM is a Customer Relationship Management platform. These databases are a sales staff’s best friend when it comes to staying organized and tracking results. Using a CRM, sales professionals create profiles for all of their prospects, listing their name, company, phone number, lead source, and any information that presents itself throughout the sales process.

While CRM platforms add a ton of helpful benefits to the life of a salesperson, it is the lead source category that aids our tracking efforts. Most CRM’s have a function that will allow you to pull up your leads and organize them by lead source. Many CRM’s will also give you the ability to export this information in the form of an Excel spreadsheet, making the document easily shareable amongst your staff.

5. KPI Tracking

KPI Tracking is how the results of our previous four methods are recorded for easy review in one list. Any point of data that gives you insight into the performance of your marketing can be considered a key performance indicator, or KPI.

By keeping track of KPI’s and compiling them together into one easily digestible list, you can efficiently gauge the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.