February 2,2022
Why you need to implement tracking and reporting.
Tracking and Reporting your data is one of the most important things you can do to better understand your marketing goals while preventing your company from wasting precious marketing budget to reach an irrelevant audience. Almost every aspect of your company’s online footprint can be tracked and reported, so let’s look into some of the best practices for doing so, as well as the most relevant business goals that you should be focusing on.
Lucky for you, most of the tools you need to record and report your data are free! Here are three of the main platforms used by marketers to track customer actions and data:
1. Google Analytics
2. Google Tag Manager
3. Facebook Pixel
All of the above tracking tools require a snippet of code to be placed into your website, so if you aren’t confident in your ability to edit code, you may need to get with your web developer to make sure they’re implemented correctly.
While it's best to be using more than one, if not all of these platforms, we’ll briefly go over the different use cases for each one.
Google Analytics gives the most general approach to your website’s performance. Key metrics on Analytics include your total website traffic, what pages your visitors are viewing, how long they stayed on your site or a specific page, and even how they arrived at your site. You can observe your historical data and look for trends and spikes that can help point you in the right direction of where your traffic is coming from and the actions that people are taking.
Google Tag Manager is a more sophisticated tool for tracking specific actions that people took on your website. Tag Manager can be used to track form submissions, how far someone scrolled down a page, how many people clicked on a certain button/hyperlink, phone number call tracking, and more. You can then use these as objectives in Google Ads to specifically target potential customers likely to take actions that matter most to your business.
Facebook Pixel works in a similar way to Google Tag Manager, where you specify the most important goals to track, and customize your Pixel to track those goals. These could be video watch completion rate (25%, 50%, 100% watched, etc.), how much of a lead form was filled out (filled out name but didn’t click submit, etc.), and much more. You can then use these actions as objectives for your Facebook Ads.
Now that we’ve touched on a few of the tools available, let’s go over why your business should be using them.
Most companies pursue a return on investment in order to stay profitable, but unfortunately the majority of businesses have no way of measuring or reporting how their marketing efforts impact their business. How can you possibly know what your company is doing right or wrong if you have no way of keeping track of it? Using analytics tools can help you figure out exactly what you need to improve on.
For example, say your business offers a variety of products, and your visitors are viewing pages frequently but not making many purchases. Analytics tools can help you gather the info needed to pinpoint where you’re losing the customer so you know where you can improve. If you’re losing them on the product details page, maybe your description is too long, or maybe your customers are having trouble finding the “add-to-cart” button. These are all things that can be tracked and diagnosed quite easily, potentially giving your sales a huge boost.
Why even set an ad budget if you can’t understand where it’s going, what it achieved, or how it’s being utilized? Proper tracking and reporting can help you optimize your ad spend so you’re only spending money on what works best for your business.
There is no “one-size-fits-all” approach to running a great ad. It takes customization and constant monitoring and modifications to make an ad perform its best. None of this is possible though without the proper analytics to diagnose problems and put an end to unnecessary ad spend.
Do you need help getting your analytics and tracking set up? Want to run an ad that’s well-optimized? At AppSoft, we’ll take the guesswork out of your digital marketing efforts by creating efficient campaigns that can fit any budget. Contact us today to get started!