Eric Wagner, Wagner Meters
FLOOR ED
How Do You Know If Your Marketing Is Working?
W
ithout knowing the answer to this one simple question, your marketing will never be on target. If you do not know which of your efforts are effective, you will always either be overspending or leaving money on the table. So how did the professionals know whether or not their marketing efforts are worthwhile?
Call Tracking The world of marketing has changed significantly with the advent of the Internet and the prevalence of digital devices. It used to be for clients, and that we would place hundreds of ads in different printed magazines, each with a different phone number. At the end of the month, the phone bill could tell us how many calls came into each number, and with a little spreadsheet work, we could track each campaign’s individual success. That methodology worked, but technology today has allowed us to take it to the next level. Companies that provide call tracking services 1 today still allow you to use the same methodology, but with automated analytics and reporting. To take it to the next level, though, you can use a service that inserts a snippet of code on your website. When a person visits your website, this code will replace the phone number the visitor sees with a number that is unique to them and then forward the call to your main number. If that person calls, this system can link that call with the actions they have taken on the site already or take in the future. This allows us to track a call or conversion from start to finish. We can see the visitor arrived on our site after searching for “android cell phones,” visited a few informational pages, a product page, and then called a salesperson to get more infor-
mation. If they come back and purchase via the website, we can track that too. Knowing how many calls a marketing campaign is driving is a key to understanding whether your efforts are worth the cost.
Conversion Tracking Any decent web analytics platform, including free Google Analytics, can track conversions and goal completions. Those are two separate things, and if you’re not tracking both, you’re probably not getting the full picture. A surprising number of small and medium-sized businesses aren’t tracking conversions. This means that they will never know how many people ended up buying based on search engine queries, or online ads, or people typing their URL directly, or after a tracked phone call if they have that setup. While it all comes down to conversions, eventually, there are often intermediate steps that you want to track to optimize your efforts. These trackable “goals” might be a webinar or newsletter signup, the download, chatting with a customer service rep, or something as specific as reading through most of a very important page on your website. Ideally, you’ll be able to track the success of each campaign through conversions or one or more of these goal completions.
Any decent web analytics platform, including free Google Analytics, can track conversions and goal completions. Those are two separate things, and if you’re not tracking both, you’re probably not getting the full picture. 70 Premier Flooring Retailer | Digital 3 2020
