Tracking and reporting are essential activities for any marketing campaign. Digital marketing allows us to be much more precise than traditional marketing, as we have access to so much more data. This makes reporting even more important, as we have more to learn!
Proper tracking and reporting allow you to measure the return on investment (ROI) or return on ad spend (ROAS) of your digital marketing campaigns, as well as metrics like which demographics engaged, when and where conversions occurred, and dozens of other key performance indicators.
Data-Driven Decisions
Data-driven decision-making is the process of using data and analytics to inform your marketing strategies and campaigns. It invoices interpreting data to gain insights into customer behaviour and campaign performance.
By making decisions that you can back with data, you can improve. You can improve customer targeting as you better understand your customer’s demographics and behaviors, improve your campaign messaging and creatives as you understand what resonates, and improve your spend mix as you understand different platforms’ performances. Using your data will help you create targeted campaigns with personalised content that will resonate with the customer.
Budget Allocation
Effective tracking and reporting help you get the most return from your digital marketing budget. You can identify when digital channels, platforms, and content drive the most conversions. Using these insights allows you to constantly adjust your budget so you can invest the most money on the channel that is providing you with the biggest ROAS.
Proof Of Performance
Proof of performance provides you with peace of mind when you are running a business. You want to make sure your digital marketing budget is being spent correctly. Once tracking and reporting are set up correctly, you will be able to see the results of your digital marketing spend. This will remove some of the anxiety associated with spending money and wondering if it benefits the business or is just wasting money.
At Sprint Digital, we create bespoke reports for our clients’ needs. These reports are tailored to their business goals and objectives. We conduct monthly review calls with our clients to evaluate our digital marketing performance and ensure that our client understands all the relevant information.
Our review calls are an excellent opportunity to collaborate with clients. They know their business, and we know the digital marketing landscape. By combining our expertise as well as the insights gathered from the reports, we can discuss ideas for new campaigns.
Competitive Advantage
Careful tracking and reporting will help you gain an advantage over your competitors. By regularly analysing your campaign results and website analytics, you will be able to spot consumer trends before your competitors.
With this information, you can improve your marketing messages to meet your customer’s needs and preferences, driving conversions, customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Essential Tracking and Reporting Tools:
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a free website analytics service offered by Google. It allows website owners and marketers to track and analyse the website or app’s performance and the website user journey. It provides valuable insights such as how many website users you have coming to your website, what channels they are coming from, and how they are spending time on your website. It also provides information about the demographic of your website users, such as their age, gender and location.
Setting up conversion tracking on Google Analytics is essential. Each website has a different goal, depending on the type of business. A service-based company may use their website to generate leads. An E-commerce website’s primary goal is to generate purchases. Setting up conversion tracking allows tracking for submissions, purchases, downloads, email collection, or phone calls. Google Analytics has advanced tracking for E-commerce websites. It helps you track product sales, revenue and transaction-related metrics.
By setting up conversion tracking, you can monitor which of your digital campaigns generate conversions. With this information, you can determine which of your digital marketing channels are performing the best and worst, and can optimise your budget to favour the best-performing channels.
Data on the demographic of converting customers is also collected. With this data, you can create custom campaigns to target other individuals in the same location, or of the same age or gender.
UTM Parameters
UTM Parameters play a vital role in your digital marketing efforts. UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) parameters are tags you can add to any URLs linked to your website within a digital marketing campaign. For example, you might link to your website from a display ad and have UTMs on the link as follows: https://www.example.com?utm_source=google_display&utm_medium=banner&utm_campaign=autumn_campaign
The UTM parameter provides valuable data available on Google Analytics, which provides an understanding of how your digital marketing efforts affected your website traffic and conversions.
UTM parameters can be particularly useful for paid and organic social media content as well as email marketing, as Google Analytics does not track these types of campaigns well and often incorrectly categorises these user acquisitions.
When creating UTM Parameter tags, you can ensure each website link shared can be catalogued under the correct source, medium and campaign.
For example, imagine you are running a Black Friday special offer. To promote this offer, you post about it organically on Facebook, run paid ads on Facebook, and email your marketing list. You want to be able to measure the metrics such as click-through rate and conversion rate for each of these digital marketing efforts.
Using UTM parameters within your social posts, ads, and email will provide you with valuable insights into which promotional efforts are bringing traffic to your website and generating conversions.
A/B Testing
AB testing is an essential way to experiment and fine-tune your marketing strategy. A/B testing compares two versions of an ad with different creatives, headlines or messages to see which ad performs the best in achieving the specific goal. When running an A/B test, it’s critical you use only one variable. For example, you use the same messaging and headline but choose a different graphic for each ad.
By using A/B testing, you can determine which ad gets the best engagement, conversion rate and return. In order to successfully run an A/B test on email marketing and social media ads, you must ensure you have set up tracking or UTM parameters correctly.
We hope this article has demonstrated that tracking and reporting are essential activities for any marketing campaign and given you some helpful tips to make sure you’re getting the most from your own tracking efforts. If you’re feeling like you might need some extra help, don’t hesitate to reach out to our team.
