By John Eberhard
If you’re a politician in this day and age, it’s popular to completely ignore or explain away the results of your policies. Or just to emphasize your good intentions, whatever those were, and not talk about the actual results.
But with marketing, it’s vital to be able to track results from your marketing actions, and to adjust your actions according to the results. Here are some tips on how to track the results of your marketing actions.
1. Tracking leads from promotion: This is a basic action but it is surprising how few companies do it. Basically you have to track every lead that comes in, and find out what prompted them to contact you. Oftentimes this is not easy because the person may not even realize what prompted them to call. But you should still try to find out. In some cases where you have a custom landing page for pay per click or email advertising, the form on that page can be coded to tell you what they were responding to. And you need to keep a graph of your leads coming in.
2. Phone tracking: For several years now I have used trackable phone numbers on pay per click ad campaigns with Google Ads. You set up a phone number with a company that does this, and every call that comes in bounces over to the client’s main phone number. And every call coming in to that number is tracked. In this way I know how many calls came in from a specific campaign.
3. Search Engine Optimization (SEO): With SEO, you are trying to improve how well your website is ranking for certain keywords. So for this activity I track how high my website is ranking for the keywords we are targeting. We check this for Google, Yahoo and Bing. And we also track the number of visits and page views on the website, as those should be increasing.
4. Pay Per Click Advertising: When you are doing advertising on Google Ads, Bing Ads, or Facebook, there are a variety of statistics you look at to measure your success. But the main thing I look at for a lead generation campaign is the number of conversions (people who clicked on your ad and then contacted you via an online form or a phone call), and the cost per conversion (take the total amount of money you spent on that ad campaign in a given time period and divide that by the number of conversions in that time period). The number of conversions should be going up over time, and the cost per conversion ideally should be going down.
Here’s an example of how this could be managed. I have one client where I have been managing their Google Ads campaigns for over 10 years. I had been doing all search campaigns for them. That’s what appears on Google when you search for something. But I had had good success with what are called display campaigns for another client. That’s where you create ads with text and pictures and these display on other sites (not on Google) that have given Google permission to run ads there. The cost for each click for the display ads was way lower than for search ads, and the number of conversions was very good. So my cost per conversion for the display campaign was much lower. Hope that all makes sense.
5. Video: With video you are trying to get across your message to as many people as possible. So the number of views on your video is something you want to pay attention to. But I consider the number of views to be a “soft” stat. Ideally with video you want to get people to respond to you as well, not just watch the video. So if you are tracking your leads and finding out what got people to respond to you, you will find out if they came from watching a video. And generally you want to always include a call to action at the end of the video, where you tell people to contact you, and put up your contact info, and in many cases make a special offer.
6. Social media marketing: Here you want to measure how many likes your page has (Facebook), or the number of your followers or connections. You can measure your engagement, i.e. how much people are liking or commenting on your posts. But again I consider this a “soft” stat. You cannot use likes or comments to pay rent or the payroll. Ideally you want people to respond to you and become leads or sales.
7. Email: Here it is pretty easy to track results, because with email you are usually linking to a landing page and that page can have a form that is coded so that the email that comes in from it tells you which landing page it came from. And you can use a trackable phone number in the email and on the landing page that tells you where the lead came from.
8. Sales: Whether you are running a lead generation campaign where leads get turned over to a salesman, or you are selling something directly in a shopping cart, the point where the rubber meets the road is sales. So you need to know whether your campaigns are producing more sales, because that obviously is the final goal. It’s possible to have a campaign producing lots of leads but hardly any or no sales, and it’s important to know that.
Humility
I believe that one of the traits of a successful marketing person is humility. In this case what it means is if your marketing campaign is failing, recognize that and stop using that campaign. Don’t keep running it because you really liked it, or because you thought it would work great, or because you know you’re a genius. Recognize your successes and failures and the way to measure this is with the statistics, as I have outlined above.
I have had campaigns I created that I thought were screaming genius and they bombed. And I have had others that I thought were just OK, that ended up being incredibly successful. How the public responds is not always what you think it will be. So take the data on what those responses are, and adjust your campaigns accordingly. Get rid of the failures fast, and take the successes and pour the coals on.
If you’d like help on tracking your marketing results, or help with any marketing issue, contact us at 661-441-2429, or fill out a form here.
