How to Track Your Marketing Results for Small and Growing Businesses
I’ll start out by telling you that calculating marketing ROI or tracking marketing attribution is one of the most difficult things to calculate in your business. This is because in most cases, marketing compounds with other factors in your business, and with other marketing efforts. For example, you may have a radio ad running that people hear and makes your Facebook post more impactful to them. Or they may see a post on Instagram that they don’t interact with, but then two weeks later when they need your product or service, they remember that post and Google your business. So there are a lot of factors to consider here. Our main goal is to utilize the data we can obtain to inform our decisions about our marketing as best we can. The more information you track over a longer time period, the more informed your decisions will be.
But why is this important? Why should we even bother tracking marketing data? Well for one, we are all individuals that are biased. So even if we feel that a particular marketing campaign or effort went exceptionally well, that may not be the real truth in the numbers. Even if customers are telling you they heard about you from a specific source, that may not be what actually caused them to become a customer. Simply put, the more information we have, the better decisions we can make to streamline our marketing efforts and focus our dollars and time in the most impactful places. So let’s get started!
If you are just getting started tracking your marketing ROI, start in these places first.
Marketing Data to Track for Beginners
Social Media Analytics
If you are using any kind of social media to market your business, make sure you are using a business account. Many platforms allow you to transition a personal account to a business account. Having a business account allows you to access data about how people are interacting with your social media content and who is interacting with your posts. This data is very easy to look at by visiting the analytics, insights, or settings and data tab on your social media profile, depending on the platform. I recommend starting a simple spreadsheet and tracking some of these numbers over time so you can see trends and changes that occur. This allows you to see how changes to your marketing impact your customers’ behavior.
Google Analytics or Website Analytics
The next tool to utilize is your website analytics tool or Google analytics. Some website platforms have analytics tools you can see data in, but if yours doesn’t offer this, or doesn’t offer very much information, connect Google Analytics by setting up an account and entering your analytics code on your website to connect the tool. This allows you to see expansive information about who is visiting your website, when, for how long, what pages they are clicking on, and where they are finding your website at. You can use this information to improve your website and know how successful your marketing is. If you aren’t seeing as many people visit your website as you would like, this is a good sign you need to focus more on your marketing to increase awareness of your business and get them to your website.
Email Marketing Analytics
If you are using your own email inbox to send emails to your customers, here’s your sign that it’s time for an upgrade. Don’t worry, you don’t have to invest in a costly email marketing software. There are lots of options out there and there are free ones as well. MailerLite and MailChimp are two free ones you can use as long as your list isn’t too large. Simply upload your contacts into your email marketing tool and instead of CCing or BCCing people when you send an email, you’ll just send an email campaign. This will give you information about how successful your emails are such as how many people are opening your emails, how many are clicking on links, and you can use this information to improve your emails over time.
Sales Analytics
Those of you who sell through your website or through a sales force software such as Square probably are going to have access to all this information at your fingertips. If you don’t use either of those options, you can track this info manually, or use a financial tracking software like Wave. Wave is my favorite tool and allows me to connect my bank account to their software, which then categorizes money that enters or exits the account and customizes reports for you based on this information. If you have a software like Stripe or Paypal that you’re using, you can connect it to Wave to receive reports like this as well which will give you greater insight into your sales data.
What we are primarily looking for here is to know how many sales you are doing each month and how much each sale’s value was. This can help you predict your business’s revenue during specific seasons over time and allow you to know if running a promotion a certain time of the year would be beneficial. This also allows you to recognize changes in your sales that you can then tie back to specific time periods in your marketing.
If this kind of stuff is causing you tech grief, don’t hesitate to send a message my way. I would be more than happy to help you connect your tools or answer your questions so you can get the information you need.
If you are not new to tracking your marketing and are ready to dive deeper into seeing what marketing efforts are most efficient for your business, here are some areas you should focus on.
Marketing Data to Track for Experienced Marketers
New vs. Returning Traffic
This breakdown is important because it shows you two things:
How many new leads are entering your business
How well you are serving existing leads
We care about both of those things separately because they are both individually important. If you want your business to grow, you absolutely need to be bringing new people into your circle. But if you want your business to be sustainable, you also need to serve the people already in your circle well. We don’t want to see 100% new traffic or 100% returning traffic on your website. Depending on your business goals, season, and age, you want to see a good balance between these two.
You can take this concept a step further and track your new vs. returning customers as well. How many people are purchasing for the very first time? How many are making repeat purchases? Ideally, we want to see a good mix of both of these happening.
Customer purchase behavior
There is a lot of information to analyze here. A few things that are most important indicators are:
Lifetime customer value
Average purchase value
Average length of time between purchases
Most frequently purchased items or services
Most related purchased items or services
Leads per month
Sales per month
Percentage of leads converted to sales per month
Diving deep into your sales data and tying that back to your marketing is some of the best information you will ever collect about your marketing. Regardless of if you are a local business, e-commerce store, or a service provider, this information will help you predict trends in your business so you can better plan your marketing accordingly.
Funnel completion percentages
This is all about finding the holes in your customer journey. Typically we look at your funnel in a series of steps:
Traffic drivers
Website or landing page
Engagement - which could be time on your website or number of pages visited
Sign of Intent - either opting in to be contacted further or adding an item to cart
Completion of Purchase- Entering payment information and clicking “buy”
We call this your funnel because the stages at the top of the list include more people who are slowly funneled down to the people who will actually make a purchase from you. You want to look at each stage of your funnel separately. How many people are clicking to view your website? How many people are spending more time there and engaging with the content? How many are taking further action? How many actually complete a purchase? Each of these numbers (I like to look at them as percentages) tells you how successful that stage in your funnel is. This can usually tell you where you need to make adjustments to your funnel and the marketing that surrounds that stage of your funnel.
If you are seeing a large number of people visiting your website but then leaving, this is a good sign that your marketing messaging isn’t matching what you provide as a business. If you are seeing large numbers of people engage with your website but not move toward purchasing, this means that your audience and your offer are not in alignment. Each of these stages in your funnel can be adjusted, and similarly, the marketing you do at each stage can be tweaked to increase your success rate.
One of my favorite tools to help you better understand your marketing in comparison to your funnel completion is through the use of UTM codes. These are simply links that identify a specific segment of traffic to your website. For example, while in Google Analytics you can see how many people are visiting your website from Facebook, UTM codes enable you to see how many people are visiting your website from a specific Facebook post. This allows you to get incredibly granular and specific in tracking your marketing efforts so you know exactly what is performing well. You can easily create UTM codes for free using the Google UTM code builder tool.
Tracking your marketing results is a time-intensive process, so before you go off the deep end and try to track everything, start by adding one or two new metrics to what you are already tracking. Make sure you can accurately track that information and act on it. Then add in additional steps.
If you aren’t sure what step to take next in tracking your marketing or are struggling to interpret the data you are collecting, I would love to help you put together a plan. Contact me to set up your consultation call and we can get you started using your information to your advantage.
More Content for You:
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