Using Analytics To Measure Marketing Effectiveness - SEOteric Digital Marketing

Using Analytics To Measure Marketing Effectiveness

Most marketing campaigns are created to drive traffic to a website, get people to come to a location, or to make a phone call about a product or service. Media and advertising create the “call to action” that persuades a potential customer to make contact. Most established businesses have a location, a website, and a phone number. Other businesses only have a website and a phone number and in either case, how can a business owner or manager measure the effectiveness of traditional or media based advertising?

With visits to a location and phone calls, sales people can easily ask a customer how they heard about the business. You can also set up a specific phone number for a marketing campaign to easily tell how effective the advertising was at generating calls. Measuring the effectiveness of website visitors to an advertising campaign (like radio, TV, or print ads) can be a little trickier.

We advise our clients to integrate some sort of tracking and analytics software on their websites. We like Google Analytics because it is free, pulls an extraordinary amount of data, and has the ability to drill down to specific reporting on visitors, traffic sources, keywords, and user behavior. Using Google Analytics, we can set up some goals and dig up statistics to find out how effective advertising is.

If the advertisement has a printed (or stated) website address, we can look for clues such as increases or spikes in the amount of direct visitors to the site. We can make an inference that the increases are coming from individuals who saw an ad, related to the product or service, and went to the website for more information. We can also look for increases in the amount of traffic brought in from searches for the business name. This can be attributed to people hearing the business name but not remembering the website address. We can also look for keywords associated with the advertisement. If there is a specific product or service advertised, we can look at the statistics for 1) incoming visitors searching for those keywords in search engines and 2) increases in traffic for the pages containing the products and services you advertised.

With traditional media and advertising, we can’t know exactly the impact it has on website visitors, but we can make some very good inferences and understand the overall impact. Adding up the increases described above will paint a fairly clear picture on the impact of advertising on website visitors.

Internet based advertising is much easier to track because we will know everything about an incoming visitor – where they came from (search engine or referring website), what they searched for (keywords) or what they clicked on (links). we will know exactly what the impact of online advertising is based on segmenting the data into these areas. This is also a great way to measure the impact of social media campaigns – you can see exactly how many visitors come from social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and more.

You can go a step further and use this for an email marketing campaign. You can parse your analytics data into referring sites, allowing you to see the incoming traffic from email accounts. You can add these together and get a great look at the traffic generated from an email newsletter, promotion emails, or even from having your website address in your email signatures.

There is a deep well of data that is available for business owners and managers to make informed decisions about where to expend energy in marketing. You can understand the impacts of traditional advertising, email campaigns, internet advertising, and printed ads. For more information on this, contact us at (800) 314-4736. Let SEOTERIC help you increase leads and help you make your marketing as effective as it can be!