I know I sound like a stuck record, but as I have said many times before, “If you cannot measure your marketing efforts/results, you should not do marketing!”. Here are some ways to measure your marketing efforts…
Paid for Google Ads – Adwords
This is not difficult, in fact all you have to do is to use Google Analytics and track your Acquisitions/Adwords/Campaigns and it will tell you what visits you got from your paid for search term adverts.
Tracking other online exposure
What happens when you post a blog post to a real estate blog in your area and you put your webpage URL link into the text and want to see how many visitors you get to your website from the external blog?
Analytics will do it’s best to try and show you the web page source, but a sure way to know how many visitors came through is to send them to an alias website address of your own website. These alias addresses are called “Urchin Tracking Module” codes and these codes help website analytical tools track the visitors. Everyone refers to these as UTM codes.
For example, let us say our site is www.smithandwesternattorneys.co.za and you post to the external 1% Real Estate Commission blog and at the bottom of the very, very, informative post, you offer a website link for people to get more information or to contact you. You could use the following link:
www.smithandwesternattorneys.co.za/?utm_source=1realestate&utm_campaign=very_information_post&utm_medium=blog
If you want you could still use the same text as your website URL, just change the link to the UTM code.
This way Google Analytics will track the visitors using this unique link and you can measure your success.
There are many UTM parameters – the one I showed above would just keep track of the source.
- utm_source – identify the source
- utm_medium – identify the medium
- utm_campaign – identify a strategic campaign
- utm_term – suggested for paid search to identify keywords
- utm_content – additional details for A/B testing and content-targeted ads.
This all looks rather daunting, but the good news is that Google has a tool that will create the UTM code for you, after you give it the information for the unique UTM code.
https://ga-dev-tools.appspot.com/campaign-url-builder/
These UTM codes are great when tracking online visitors, because you can hide the long UTM codes behind a straight forward website address. BUT…
How to track physical media visitors (offline)
Let us say you advertise on a new billboard on the M1 and you want to track the visitors to your website or service. Using the long UTM code is not going to work as these people will not write down the entire code (although a QR blocks for scanning may work) – so you need something short and easy to remember.
The easy solution here is to use a new domain name – for our example of Smith & Western Attorneys, they could use a domain like:
www.smithandwestern.co.za.
Then you copy your home page to this domain and then link to the original site if they click on anything – or tailor the landing page to address the exact message of the billboard.
Telephone call tracking
You have to use a new dedicated telephone number for the campaign, or if your switchboard can handle an extra character when people dial in, it might be able to redirect that call.
If you are not going to use a separate number, make sure the persona answering the phone keeps track of the people calling.
Email tracking
The easiest way is to setup a new email address and then forward all those emails to the person responsible for the campaign.
There are many other more sophisticated means in tracking leads, the above are just a few simple ideas of being able to see the number of visitors being attracted through your marketing efforts.
Thanks to Paddy Crooks of DotNewsConnect for the Google UTM Creation Tool tip.