Reasons to keep track of your marketing activities
A lot of businesses operate using limited budgets for their advertising and they utilize only limited time and resources in keeping track of the effectiveness of their marketing activities. The truth is they need data to analyse the profit gotten from digital campaigns in order to pick the best. The ability to keep track of your visitors’ interests is a great way to improve the interaction between you and allocate more money during the campaign. Furthermore, when you monitor the performance of your campaign you will get the ability to maximize the campaigns in the future. When you know the interest of your visitors and the effects of each unit of traffic on your site, you can start to maximize your campaigns and get better results. It is worth putting more time and effort.
Ways to monitor the performance of your digital advertising campaign
A valuable tool to monitor the effectiveness of your campaign is Google Analytics. If the right settings are used, Google Analytics will highlight all the aspects that will help you determine the success of your advertising, but it demands that you implement your campaign tagging.
In order to monitor the performance of your digital campaign with Google Analytics, you will need to create a tracking URL or UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) parameters, which Google Analytics can easily use in the identification and analysis of a certain campaign. UTMs are used in sending information to Google Analytics concerning the location where your campaign traffic originated from and how users navigated to your website.
Setting up UTM parameters
There are 5 distinct parameters which can be configured, but only three of them are important to campaign tracking:
utm_source
This is the site where the traffic originated from and is also referred to as the referrer (Facebook, Google, etc). Most times, the source is a description of the previous website visited by visitors.
utm_medium
This is the medium of the link (CPC, CPM, etc). The medium means the channel which the visitors followed to the site.
utm_campaign
This is the name or title of that campaign.
Note: Each channel you are making use of for your promotion should utilize a unique tracking URL. This will make it easy for you to report on each individual channel and each source, medium or campaign together.
For instance, if we decided to create a post of this article on Facebook and monitor each traffic unit that will reach our site, we would make use of a tracking URL with these UTM parameters:
Then in our Google Analytics account, we can view line facebook – post and monitor the activity of users who visited our site using the link on the Facebook post.
How to measure and assess the results of your campaign?
You have learned how to configure and track the performance of your digital campaign. You will now be able to get a lot of data relating to your campaigns. The next thing to determine is the most important pieces of data to view. Based on the fact that you now have access to a lot of data, it may become difficult to know which ones are the most important for the information you want to obtain.
Sessions to the site
Do you want to know which of the digital campaigns is attracting more people to your website? A simple indicator will show the number of visitors to your website via a particular tracking URL.
Page Views per session
Google Analytics is designed to be able to show how your visitors navigated your site and will also provide an average number of the pages viewed per visit. It shows whether the visitors to your site are interested in the content or not.
Average session duration
Once more, the time spend on your site isn’t equivalent to sales, but people who spend a lot of time browsing have a higher chance of making a purchase.
Bounce rate
If you have a digital campaign with a high bounce rate – which means that a lot of people exit the site as soon as it is opened – it could mean that there is a lack of correlation between your marketing strategy and landing page.
Achievement of goals
Goals are a way to monitor the actions people perform on your site by comparing them with specific goals and to determine what channels are generating the highest number of conversions.
A better form of measurement is vital to getting the most of any marketing campaign. Making use of Google Analytics will help you have more exact values on the people visiting your website and the different ways in which you can make use of data to improve your digital marketing strategy.
