When investing in a campaign to try and increase brand awareness and grow a business, it’s very important to track its success and this is made really easy online with the help of goal tracking.
There are many paid options for tracking traffic and sales, as well as services such as phone call tracking, and these all have a purpose depending on what sort of business you are running and the level of tracking that you require. You need to think if paying for a service, such as call tracking, will mean you can streamline your marketing budgets enough to warrant the cost of the system in the first place, and many can.
Google Analytics and Google AdWords however, allow you to track on-site engagement, known as goals or conversions, such as online enquiry form completions, downloads of white papers or online sales, for free.
To track online sales you must have ecommerce tracking set up and turned on within Google Analytics. For detailed instructions on this see: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1009612?hl=en
This then allows you to track ecommerce transactions on your website and see what channels are generating the most revenue, whether it be organic, paid or referral.
If you have paid for a listing on a website or sent out an email campaign, you can track the revenue generated from those with the use of campaign tracking URLs. You can build campaign tracking URLs using Google’s URL Builder, which means that you can see how many times a link has been clicked, and what tyour traffic did next by visiting the Acquisition >> Campaigns section of Google Analytics.
You can also track eCommerce transactions within Google AdWords with the help of conversion tracking code. This code is placed on the ‘thank you’ page seen when a transaction is completed and reports back the value of the sale, attributing it to the ad and keyword that were used to get there.
In order to track the dynamic value your developer should alter the standard code provided within Google AdWords. For more details see: https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/1722054?hl=en
If you do not have an eCommerce site it’s still important to track the success of your campaigns and on-site engagement. There are many other, softer, conversions that you could track. Here are a few examples:
- Enquiry form completions
- On page engagement such as:
- number of pageviews
- average time on site
- viewing a particular page (ie. a contact us page)
- Events (ie. downloading a white paper or watching a video)
All of these can be imported into Google AdWords to see what keywords and ads are generating the conversions/goals as long as your AdWords and Analytics accounts are linked. You can track things like enquiry form completions with AdWords conversion tracking code by adding it to the ‘thank you’ page seen when the form is completed and adding an average value or a ‘0’ if you can’t assign a monetary value.
Goal and conversion tracking is extremely important to gauge the success of online campaigns and can help you make money-saving decisions in the future, so make sure you use it. If you need any help running successful marketing campaigns, then get in touch.
