How to Track Your Local Online Business Marketing Campaign
Tracking your online business marketing campaign can be daunting. A successful marketing campaign needs to be tracked for success. But before doing this, you’ll need to have a strategy. If you still don’t know how to come up with a marketing strategy, you’d better read it here.
Importance of a Marketing Strategy for Your Business
As soon as your business is online and running, you may want to run a series of promotions to increase exposure, engagement, and sales. If you choose to run such promotions, it’s advisable that you don’t do it blindly. Make sure you have a monitoring system that tracks every activity on your business website. Doing this helps you understand strategies that resonate with your customers.
With a marketing strategy you will know how to better manage your budget. Teejai Kimsey – Founder and Internet-Marketing Strategist at Internet Idea Girl advises that, “if a marketing tool is unable to yield results, then you shouldn’t continue investing your time and money into it. But if another tool gets a positive response in terms of sales and engagement, then you may invest more time and resources into it.”
Here are more ways you can incorporate into your marketing strategy to track marketing campaigns.
1. Create Landing Pages for Your Business
So far this has proven to be one of the best ways to track your marketing campaign promotions. Creating landing pages enables you to focus on important goals for your promotional marketing campaign, and allows you to target a campaign to the right audience type. One of the best tools to track marketing campaigns is Google Analytics. Assuming you have set up your marketing goals in Google Analytics, you can track the number of conversions you’ll receive from your marketing campaigns.
Important tips for creating landing pages
- Use shortened URLs
- Always include your business phone number
- Keep a log of your landing page URLs and note where you have used them before
- Include a “noindex” meta tag
2. Consider Using Discount Codes
You may have come across this statement online “use promo code SIMPLEMACHINEDESIGNS2015 to get 10% OFF your order,” which can be a good way to track marketing campaigns. You may have your custom discount code placed on your landing pages or other sections of your business site. One good way to track your efforts is by using custom variables, which can be done through Google Analytics. If you are unsure how variables work, use this Google Analytics Custom Variables Guide to help you track your marketing campaign discount and promotional codes.
3. Use Domain Redirects To Track Marketing Campaigns
Another good way to track your marketing campaign is by utilizing domains that are specifically created to redirect visitors to your landing pages on your business website. This means if you have a business situated in different locations – whether in your country or in specific locations within the U.S., you can have domain redirects created to target people in these locations. An example is SimpleMachineDesigns.com, which targets the general internet users while ARSimpleMachineDesigns.com mainly targets residents in Arkansas, U.S.
Simple tips to remember about domain redirects
- Always ensure that you DON’T create duplicate content
- Choose a name that is unforgettable
- Convert it to a custom shortened URL
- Keep track of your shortened URL. Unfortunately, Google Analytics can only track people who haven’t enabled privacy protection on their browsers. In order to get the most out of your marketing campaign efforts, you’d probably need to create a free Bitly URL Shortener account, since it helps track your bitly shortened urls. You can view actual click-through stats of your shortened links from the dashboard of your bitly analytics system.
4. Notations and Direct Traffic
This option is important and can be used to measure direct traffic, and can be done using Google Analytics. It’s a reflection of the number of visitors who can’t be traced to other online sources. Examples include referring websites, search engines, and social networking sites.
Downside: Your business website is constantly receiving direct traffic from visitors who are always typing your business site’s name directly into their browser’s address bar.
This is where you get to experience the importance of using notations. To view how this works, you can log into your Google Analytics account then, click on Traffic Sources >> Sources > Direct to analyze the amount of traffic you receive regularly. Double clicking on dots marked by a particular dates on the graph enables you to create notations – simple notes that remind you of specified intention regarding your marketing campaigns.
Are you still experiencing problems tracking your marketing campaigns?
You may first need to come up with constructive marketing strategies. And we can do it for you too here at Simplemachine. Please contact us today with any questions that you may have.
