Google Analytics: The Must Have For All Marketing Campaigns
Wednesday, December 30th, 2009For decades, business owners and marketing professionals have had to rely on some pretty unreliable sources to determine the success of a marketing campaign. Guestimates, gut instincts, and the always reliable answers to “how did you hear about us?” were usually the best we could do. Today, with the accessibility and affordability of website analytics tools, those days are long gone.
At Pomerantz, we strongly believe that a website is the hub of all marketing strategy; it’s the being that supports your sales and marketing efforts. So if you have a website, it doesn’t matter what type of marketing campaign you are initiating– email, direct mail, social media, print, pay-per-click, banner advertising– everything and anything can and should be measured. Tracking campaigns using an analytics tool, such as Google Analytics, will give you insight into each marketing campaign’s impact on leads, revenue and ROI, as well as the ability to compare the results of different marketing activities to determine where you are getting the most bang for your buck. You will be able to determine which campaigns send the most qualified visitors to your website, assess campaign performance by product or region, discover if new visitors or returning visitors convert more often, and predict future outcomes.
Unless all you care about is website traffic, which hopefully is not the case, the catch is that you can’t track the effectiveness of your marketing strategies if you don’t use analytics goals. A goal, or conversion, is any action that you desire a visitor to your website to take, such as filling out a contact form or completing a transaction. You could have one goal or many goals, it’s up to you. Once you establish your goal(s) and set them up to be tracked in your analytics application, you can start tracking the conversions generated by your marketing efforts.
Here’s an example of how to integrate analytics and goal tracking with a marketing campaign:
Company A launches a marketing campaign consisting of direct mail and email marketing. All pieces drive recipients to a microsite specifically dedicated to the campaign which has the conversion point front and center on the home page of the microsite and on all interior pages on the site. Google Analytics works behind the scenes on this campaign to track visitor behavior and the data obtained allows Company A (or their marketing agency) to quickly determine the success of the campaign and gain insights to help finesse the strategy for future purposes.
The bottom line is– you should not run a marketing campaign without being able to understand and evaluate its success and learn from the results. Take the guesswork out of marketing and let data drive your strategies. Google Analytics is free so there is absolutely no reason not to!
For decades, business owners and marketing professionals have had to rely on some pretty unreliable sources to determine the success of a marketing campaign. Guestimates, gut instincts, and the always reliable answers to “How did you hear about us?” were usually the best we could do. Today, with the accessibility and affordability of website analytics tools, those days are long gone.
At Pomerantz, we strongly believe that a website is the hub of all marketing strategy; it’s the being that supports your sales and marketing efforts. So if you have a website, it doesn’t matter what type of marketing campaign you are initiating– email, direct mail, social media, print, pay-per-click, banner advertising– everything and anything can and should be measured. Tracking campaigns using an analytics tool, such as Google Analytics, will give you insight into each marketing campaign’s impact on leads, revenue and ROI, as well as the ability to compare the results of different marketing activities to determine where you are getting the most bang for your buck. You will be able to determine which campaigns send the most qualified visitors to your website, assess campaign performance by product or region, discover if new visitors or returning visitors convert more often, and predict future outcomes.
Unless all you care about is website traffic, which hopefully is not the case, the catch is that you can’t track the effectiveness of your marketing strategies if you don’t use analytics goals. A goal, or conversion, is any action that you desire a visitor to your website to take, such as filling out a contact form or completing a transaction. You could have one goal or many goals, it’s up to you. Once you establish your goal(s) and set them up to be tracked in your analytics application, you can start tracking the conversions generated by your marketing efforts.
Here’s an example of how to integrate analytics and goal tracking with a marketing campaign:
Company A launches a marketing campaign consisting of direct mail and email marketing. All pieces drive recipients to a microsite specifically dedicated to the campaign which has the conversion point front and center on the home page of the microsite and on all interior pages on the site. Google Analytics works behind the scenes on this campaign to track visitor behavior and the data obtained allows Company A (or their marketing agency) to quickly determine the success of the campaign and gain insights to help finesse the strategy for future purposes.
The bottom line is– you should not run a marketing campaign without being able to understand and evaluate its success and learn from the results. Take the guesswork out of marketing and let data drive your strategies. Google Analytics is free so there is absolutely no reason not to!
