One thing I often observe when speaking with clients and people in general is the widespread acceptance of fuzzy numbers when it comes to evaluating the results of advertising and marketing campaigns. In hazy numbers I’m referring to traditional norms of how managers assess whether their marketing efforts are profitable to their bottom line…and in reality they’re not google utm builder!
Thanks to Google Analytics and similar web analysis tools, the door have been opened up to an entirely new realm of research and measurement. Google Analytics will automatically track traffic via AdWords PPC, other search engines, as well as referrals from other websites (anyone who visits your website through a link on an other domain) And we’re not just talking about visit statistics here! There’s a wealth of information for users of Analytics which requires no efforts beyond initial installation. Things like bounce rates as well as conversions, revenue and even your users geographical location and connection speed are all automatically recorded.
This is great info but what happens to offline marketing? Traditional markets like radio, print, and TV advertising provide figures such as “potential audience exposure” to provide an estimate of the number of people you can reach. However, wouldn’t it be nice to know the number of people who actually watched your advertisement? Perhaps even more important what percentage of people watched your commercial and later purchased some thing from you? It would be fantastic to be able to claim, “Well, our site got tons of high-quality traffic from our TV commercial during Seinfeld, but we got nothing from our spot during The Andy Griffith Show.” (The issue here is simple viewers of The Andy Griffith Show do not have computers.)
How do you measure the effectiveness of online marketing campaigns that aren’t automatically integrated in to your Google Analytics interface? For instance did you know that when you’re using sponsored ads or PPC in Yahoo or MSN without using proper tracking procedures and all the traffic is recorded as referral or direct traffic? What can you do to determine that spending $500 per month on Yahoo is producing high-quality traffic?
We’re fortunate to have a few tools available! Three easy steps you can take to monitor non-Google-sourced web traffic:
1.) Particular landing pages. In truth, this is the ideal for any marketing endeavor! The idea of directing customers to a separate page , rather than your homepage is an excellent idea in any case but here’s the reason:
Tracking and Analysis. The most efficient way to analyze the effectiveness for marketing efforts is by directing customers to a certain website or page…one that is advertised only at a specific place and not accessible from other locations. For example, you operate FruitsJuice (dot).com. You could run an advertisement on “Fruit Juice Enthusiast Monthly” which encourages readers to visit BananaKoolAid (dot) www.bananakoolaid.com, an online site that specifically promotes banana juice. Since you’ve only promoted the website once and you’ll soon know which magazine is the best for your ad.
Customized design and appeal. You’re segmenting your possible customer base, don’t you think? If you are selling the banana-flavored Kool-Aid on the internet Your conversion rate will be better if the ads and the website you direct traffic to are tied to a particular product. Do not direct people to your home page, instead send them to the banana juice website!
2.) The URL Builder from Google is your best friend. It’s important! All marketing initiatives that are not Google-based need to be tagged with links! When you add an unique identifier at the end of any off-site link that they are telling Google, “Any actions by this visitor should be attributed to THIS campaign.” This is a good practice for banner ads or paid links, newsletters and email marketing. In short everything you’d like to observe as a source for income and/or traffic! For instance, suppose you’ve purchased banner ads on a website known as FruitJuiceEnthusiast which you’d want to know how many people are interested in your banana-flavored related advertisements. By connecting the banner to this URL, you’re categorizing the visitors for Google Analytics. It’s not necessary to instruct Analytics to keep an eye out for these tags. When visitors visit this site the tracking script will automatically pull the data and is able to categorize it!
Here, 3 parameters are defined:
Source. FruitJuiceEnthusiast is the site that’s driving the traffic. Be aware that you are able to name them as you like, but shorter is best. Abbreviate if necessary!
Medium. This is the place or the type of link the user landed at. For example, you may have multiple kinds of ads on FruitJuiceEnthusiast . by marking the banner’s URL this way you can determine which type of ad has more metrics.
Campaign. It is ideal for different categories or products This informs Analytics that this particular advertisement is part of specific campaign.
It is a good thing that they are easily created by using Google’s URL Builder. There are other parameters you can add to your tag to indicate additional details however, the three components that are listed below are all the mandatory ones. A shorter URL is better therefore only tag the things that are absolutely essential and don’t overdo it.
3.) 3. And remember, as always…don’t ignore the household chores. The URL tag and the traffic statistics are tracked through Google Analytics. Google Analytics tracking code, that should be placed on every page on your website. The code is prone to disappear as changes are implemented to pages. The entire monitoring and campaign management could be lost if the basic maintenance of your site falls to the by the wayside. This is a fairly easy tip, however I like to always include it from time to the time, this code can be able to take a break from your site’s pages.
With a bit of care and imaginative campaign management, you’ll get traditional marketing campaigns away from”the “hazy numbers” field and begin working with real and actionable information.