Module 7: Tracking Your Marketing Results

However, tracking and measuring results is one of the most challenging parts of marketing for many people. It’s not as simple as looking at total sales or profit since those can be the result of many different activities, some of which could have nothing to do with your marketing at all.

Your ultimate measure is Return on Investment (ROI). Try to assign specific portions of your marketing budget to specific marketing campaigns in order to make this metric work for you. There’s bound to be some impact from one marketing initiative on another, but approximate ROI is better than not measuring it at all.

If you’ve followed the SMART criteria, you’ll already have an idea of what you have to measure for each of your marketing goals. The question now should be the specific metrics to track and how to measure them. 

Next, we’ll take a look at some of the common metrics you’ll need to understand in order to measure your marketing results, depending on what goals you’ve set:

• Unique Visitors – New visitors to your site vs. returning ones.
• Page Views – The number of pages visitors have looked at.
• Bounce Rate – How long visitors spend on your site before leaving.
• Traffic Sources – Where your visitors are coming from (eg, search engines, social sites, email, other pages, etc.)
• Inbound Links – Other sites that are linking to your content.
• Keywords – The keywords people used to find your site in search engines.
• Conversion Rate – How many people perform a desired action after landing on a web page

• Lifecycle – How long it takes to convert a prospect to a customer in your sales funnel.
• Conversion Rate – The percent of people who perform a specified action (eg, sign up for your email list, click on a link, buy a product, etc.)
• Average Lifetime Customer Value – How much your average customer is worth in terms of revenue over their lifetime with you.
• Customer Satisfaction – The ratings customers give for how satisfied they are with your service.

• Opens – How many people opened your emails
• Clicks – How many people clicked on a link in your emails
• Conversions – How many people purchased something after clicking on a link
• Unsubscribes – How many people unsubscribed from your list
• Subscribers – How many current and new subscribers you have.

• Likes
• Shares
• Engagement
• Retweets
• ‘Plus Ones’
• Repins
• Followers

• Cost per Click (CPC) – How much it cost you each time someone clicks on your ad
• Cost per Impression (CPM) – Actually, this is cost per 1,000 times people viewed your ad
• Cost per Action (CPA) – What the actual cost was to achieve a desired action, such as a sign-up, website visit, like or share.

When you sign up for an account and tie it to a specific website, you’ll receive a piece of code that you’ll then insert into your website or anywhere else that allows you to track with Analytics.

Once you’ve added your tracking code, you’ll start receiving data within a few days. You can get data on everything from your Audience to your mobile ecommerce site to social sharing. You can even set goals for your site and track events.

The challenge with Google Analytics is the overwhelming amount of information you receive from Google.  To make it easier to track results, try creating your own custom reports by specifying exactly which key metrics you want to track. You can also create your own custom ‘Dashboards’ for different types of measures.

Check out the pre-designed Dashboards that Google has to see if there are ones that will work for you that are already set up.

Just click on ‘Dashboards’ at the top of the left-hand menu and then “+New Dashboard”.  Click on “Import from Gallery and browse through. A good one to start with is the one from the Analytics Team call New Google Analytics User Starter Bundle.

Keep it simple to start with and gradually explore Google Analytics as you progress in your business. Otherwise, you’ll end up wasting hours of time figuring out what to measure and then never get anything done!

Set just a few measures for your overall marketing goals. Then specify other measures for each marketing campaign or initiative you conduct.  You’ll be deciding on some of those initiatives later in this course, after you’ve established your marketing mix. So for now, just focus on the measures for your goals.