Data and targeting are the foundations of modern marketing. In the digital world, you can how people find you and then follow their paths to your site. Armed with this information, you can make informed decisions to optimize your campaign initiatives and show true returns on investment. Before you get started, you will want to identify which measurable indicators matter most to you. Decide how to track it, then sit back and watch the data come rolling in.
Here are a few simple methods that will help you track and collect your data:
UTM Parameters
Next time you click on a link, check the end of the website address. You may see some text – this is called a UTM code. This is an easy-to-use and very customizable way to call out data in Google Analytics. For example, if you want to track how many people are clicking on your July newsletter banner and checking out your latest blog, you can use Google’s UTM Builder, to create the following URL:
http://www.informaticsinc.com/blog1234?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=banner&utm_campaign=July
You will be able to reference this data in a number of different views throughout the Analytics platform and see how traffic is coming in and how visitors are interacting with your website.
A Word of Caution: One capitalized letter or misspelled word will separate your data. If this is being implemented over a large marketing strategy, consider building an automated tool to generate the codes in a congruent manner.
Goal Tracking
If you set out a plan, it will pay off now! Let’s say you need to show that 20 people per month are downloading a resource to justify the time spent creating it. You have attached the UTM tracking code to all your links and you know where traffic is coming from. Now you need to choose how you want to track each download:
Analytics Goals
If you are using Google Analytics, you already have a code snippet placed on your website that feeds information to their servers. To tell Google’s servers that you want to record every instance a resource is downloaded, you just need to place some code on the ‘Thank You’ page that they will see after it has downloaded.
A Word of Caution: You may need help from a developer with this if you are not using a Content Management System.
Google Tag Manager
If you are only tracking a few goals, then Google Analytics makes sense. For a more scalable solution that reduces implementation and developer time, Google Tag Manager is the tool you need. With one code implementation, you will be able to set up, edit, and track goals across multiple websites and platforms.
A Word of Caution: If you are migrating all your tags to manager, take extra steps to ensure that you are continuing to collect all the vital data you need (Luna Metrics).
Need a tracking plan that fits with your marketing goals? Contact Informatics today. With collective experience in both digital marketing and web development, we have the skills you need to get the best possible results out of your campaign.
