If you are considering spending money advertising online, you need to make sure both you and your website have the two main elements required to ensure you can track spend and prove the money you are spending is working.
These elements are:
- Tracking system for analytics
- Trackable calls to action or identifiable forms to allocate conversions or actions to the correct marketing channel.
Analytics
Without a tracking system, you will find it hard to track any effectiveness of your marketing channels, neither will you be able to reconcile any traffic stats from those services you are spending money with.
There are a number of free tracking options you can signup to. We have used both of the services and we prefer google analytics (www.google.co/uk/analytics) as it is free and is pretty industry standard and allows you to track everything you need to.
An alternative option is get clicky (www.clicky.com)
Trackable Forms
After analytics you will be also be advised to setup a form system that allows you to track enquiries. While you can track online sales via analytics, if you are offering niche products that require a form fill, there are systems you can use to help collect enquiries and be able to track them right back to the original source.
This helps you prove success or failure.
As we prefer using WordPress to build and deploy client sites we use either gravity forms which has a huge number of benefits or contact form 7 which is a simpler form system but still allows you to track.
Not all forms are the same. What do you want to do with a form once completed, do you have a newsletter system, does it go into a CRM system?
What to track?
The easy answer is track and monitor everything but do keep an eye on these major key indicators:
- Sources of traffic – where it is coming from?
- Volume of traffic by source – how much is coming via what source?
- Bounce rates – are people staying or hitting your site and leaving straight away?
- Conversion goals, events or actions – if they are staying are they doing those things you want them too?
- Enquiry forms – are they filling in forms?
With both of these systems in place you will be in a much better place to understand what works and what doesn’t with your marketing.
