Marketing

5 Tools for Tracking Your Online Marketing & Growth

Building a successful small business requires actionable data to make informed decisions. The rise of the Internet has given big companies an incredible amount of data on their customers, but there are a lot of resources available to small businesses, too. Below are 5 tools for tracking your website and marketing’s effectiveness.

WEBSITE ANALYTICS Google Analytics is the most used website analytics software. Once installed, you can see your website traffic and visitor data. You can see where your visitors are geographically, what kind of device (mobile phone, tablet, PC) they are using, and filter by demographics and behavior. You can set up goals, events and even track conversion flow. Best of all, it’s completely free.

AD CONVERSION TRACKING Whether you are using Facebook Ads, Google Ads, or something else, it’s important to be able to track whether your ads are effective. Instead of sending visitors to your home page, create a custom landing page for each ad campaign, and be sure to include the tracking code provided to register each visit in your website’s analytics software. This will allow you to see whether visitors from your paid advertising are actually converting (filling out contact forms, buying products, etc.) or just bouncing off your site.

PHONE & URL TRACKING Traditional advertising is often accused of being ineffective compared to digital advertising, but in reality, it’s just more challenging to get good data on which ads perform best to be able to test and improve over time. There are tools that can help track the performance of your traditional ad campaigns, like phone and URL (website link) tracking. These tools allow you to see how many phone calls or clicks are coming from a particular ad campaign, which will help you determine its effectiveness.

CRM TRACKING A CRM (customer relationship management) system is just a database of all your customers and all your interactions with them. A good CRM will track a customer’s orders, returns, emails, phone calls, and even live chats and social messages. Analyzing trends in customer support inquiries, for instance, can lead to automations and response templates that cut down on time to respond and improve the customer relationship. Popular CRMs include Salesforce, Hubspot, and Zoho CRM, but there are often industry-specific platforms.

LIFETIME VALUE Acquiring a new customer can cost five times more than retaining an existing customer, but few small businesses focus on data-driven customer retention campaigns. Knowing your customer LTV, or lifetime value, is critical to creating an effective customer loyalty or win-back campaign. Tools like Lifetimely can show you the lifetime value of customers, and let you export specific segments of customers (like customers who purchased 5 times previously, but haven’t purchased in six months) to let you create targeted campaigns to win back customers.

START USING DATA IN YOUR DECISION-MAKING TODAY Start tracking and using data to help inform your business and marketing decisions. It will lead to lower customer acquisition and retention costs and higher revenues and give you a definitive edge over your competition.

Brandon Eley EleyDigital brandon@eleydigital.com https://www.eleydigital.com Phone: 706-407-1047