Digital marketing has some great advantages over traditional marketing – according to recent research there are 4.2 billion active users on social media globally. Users spend a lot of time online daily for a number of reasons:
- To find out about and engage with brands,
- To research products (B2C)and
To source new products (B2B)
John Wanamake famously once said ‘Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.’ Many small businesses today struggle with this same issue. In this article I compare concepts in your digital journey with a physical journey. These goals or Setting tangible goals and measuring what’s working is central to developing a successful digital strategy. Another major advantage to digital is that you can also carefully measure and track your user engagement online, and assess what tactics are really working for you. So when correctly
It is really important to track the success your tactics on an ongoing basis, paying attention to the milestones you have set for your journey. In doing this, can be sure that your hard work is paying off AND you can address anything that needs adjusting.
There are some great metrics provided on social media relating to engagement stats, but here we will detail a list of other useful tools that you can use to measure what matters.
Website Traffic: Google Analytics
Google analytics is a free and very accessible way for you to measure your website traffic over time. This tool has some very detailed capabilities, but at a glance, it allows you to assess user behaviour on your website. You can gain insight into:
- What campaigns / channels are working for you,
- Where your users are coming from,
- What devices/browsers they are using and
- How users are spending time while on your website.
In a nutshell, if you have a website you should be using Google Analytics (or an equivalent) to track engagement.
Email Marketing? Use UTMs with Google Analytics
UTM (Urchin Traffic Monitor/Module) is a snippet of code that you add to any URL which allows you to track the performance of your email campaigns or content. There are 5 variants of URL parameters you can track – source, medium, campaign, term and content.
Meta’s Pixel on your Website
Meta’s (Facebook) pixel is a snippet of code that you install across your website which allows you to understand actions your users take onsite. When a user clicks through from Facebook or Instagram, the pixel will gather data, optimise and build audiences for any future ad campaigns that you run, allowing you to drive consideration with already interested users. It will also allow you to effectively measure cross-device behaviour and engagement. This tool is essential to you if Facebook advertising forms part of your digital strategy.
Tracking from other channels…
Other ways of tracking users engagement from varied digital channels, whether SMS or WhatsApp messages, to emails and traditional marketing might include the following…
Bit.ly / tinyurl etc
These services allow you to shorten any long web address – a handy way to save characters where necessary. The real use however, is how it then records link traffic and the source of the traffic. This tool is great to use to measure engagement on: download links, product landing, forms or blogs. It provides you with great engagement insight from multiple distributed sources.
If you would like some advice or guidance on developing your strategy and beginning your journey, why not call us today, or request a consultation below.