Do you know how profitable your marketing campaigns are? Have you identified your highest ROI channels? Do you know which marketing strategies drive traffic and conversions to your business?
Tracking your digital marketing activities is critical for allocating your budget in a way that enables you to meet your business goals.
For example, a 2022 HubSpot Report shares that 80% of businesses use paid social media advertising. And Facebook and YouTube are the most popular platforms for
brands to spend their advertising budget.
The kicker? Their investment wasn’t based on guesswork.
Failing to track your marketing efforts means you’ll spend money on platforms and strategies that don’t guarantee a return.
So, if you’re not already tracking your marketing analytics, now’s the time to start. Here are eight ways to track your marketing activities:
Use a High-Quality CRM
Did you know that the CRM market revenue is projected to grow to $49.6 billion globally by 2025?
A high-quality CRM system collects, organizes, and manages all your customer-related information. As a result, you can streamline communication, track the customer journey for every person you interact with, improve data management, and enhance the customer experience.
One effective all-in-one CRM platform is HubSpot, which centers everything you do around your customers.
Capabilities of the HubSpot CRM
HubSpot CRM ties every marketing interaction to closed revenue. It helps you track the whole customer lifecycle — from anonymous visitors to loyal customers. The CRM system also breaks down marketing reports by contact or company-level properties to identify key trends over time.
As a result, you can create behavioral events and monitor actions taken on your website to understand users’ behavior and trigger automation workflows.
HubSpot CRM also measures your website’s performance in real time with key website metrics. Therefore, you can analyze how each page performs and identify which traffic sources generate the most website contacts, sessions, and customers over time.
With such information, you can focus your marketing initiatives on strategies that generate the most value.
Once you set up your marketing campaigns, HubSpot CRM will give you detailed reports for each of your marketing channels — website, landing pages, social media accounts, emails, blog posts, etc.
You can then add any marketing report to your dashboard to track the crucial metrics in one place — and share the insights with the rest of your marketing team.
Other Great CRM Options
While all CRM systems should help you build solid relationships with your customer base, there’s no one-size-fits-all system. CRM solutions can differ significantly depending on the features they focus on.
Here are some other great CRM options that can help with your data analytics:
- Zoho — a cloud-based CRM solution designed for small and medium-sized businesses. Its interface has CRM tools such as product configuration and reporting, customer analytics, sales and marketing automation, and customer support.
- Zendesk — a CRM platform that offers solutions to sales and service teams. Its fully-customizable help desk solution simplifies things for customers, prepares your teams for success, and keeps your business on track.
- Monday.com — a highly customizable, robust platform that helps you monitor all aspects of the sales cycle (from lead generation to post-sale support) and streamline your workflows. For similar tools, check monday.com alternatives to get more features for current needs.
- Salesforce — a cloud-based CRM platform with an extensive network of add-ons for sales, customer service, marketing, and platform-as-a-service (PaaS).
- Workast — a work management platform where you can easily organize and prioritize your tasks, track project progress, and monitor to-do lists in one convenient location.
- Contentstudio —ContentStudio’s analytics feature provides invaluable insights into the performance of your social media content. With detailed metrics and data-driven analysis, you can measure the effectiveness of your campaigns, track engagement levels, and identify trends.The analytics feature offers a comprehensive view of your audience demographics, allowing you to tailor your content to resonate with your target market. By leveraging ContentStudio’s analytics, you can make informed decisions, optimize your social media strategy, and drive better results.
- BIGContacts – A cloud-based contact manager software and CRM solution best suited for startups and small businesses. Its sales pipeline management and email marketing automation feature and customized reporting functionality within this pricing make it more preferable.
Use Designated Domains With Tracking Capabilities for Each Marketing Channel
Using designated domains helps you track which channel is responsible for the highest increase in your website traffic. You can study that channel and keep adjusting your marketing strategies and domain portfolio to serve your target audience better.
Designating domains to specific channels also allows you to segment your audience and target different niches.
For example, you can create a primary website with content to appeal to your primary demographics (let’s say, teenage girls). You can then leverage a different domain to appeal to a secondary demographic (middle-aged women).
As a result, you can test how your content performs for different audiences and adjust accordingly.
Also, domains play a significant role in keyword relevance and rankings, so using multiple domains can help you rank for a wide selection of keywords and phrases.
Leverage Website Analytics
Website analytics tools collect, report, and analyze marketing data from visitors interacting with your website. This data includes traffic sources, bounce rate, new and returning visitors, and time spent on the website.
Such data helps you understand your website visitors better and use those insights to improve the user experience. For example, if you notice that most users access your website through a mobile device, you can prioritize making your website more mobile-friendly.
Web analytics can also shape your SEO strategy and content marketing.
For instance, when you look at your most viewed posts, you can identify what types of content perform best. If you notice how-to WordPress tutorials make up most of your top viewed posts, you can narrow your focus from definition articles to how-to WordPress tutorials.
Or, maybe email and organic traffic are your top drivers, and paid advertising channels are your lowest (16% of users say they hate Google Ads and actively avoid clicking on them). In that case, you can shift resources to invest more in your email and organic strategies than paid ads.
Track Your Conversion Rate (CVR)
Conversion rate shows how good your marketing strategy is at getting consumers to do what you want them to do — make a purchase, sign up for a subscription, call your business, or submit a form. Generally, the higher your conversion rate, the better your marketing strategy.
The conversion rate will also help you know if a marketing strategy costs more than the average order value (AOV) you get from it. And that becomes crucial when you want to hire Google ads advertisers or set return on investment (ROI) expectations when scaling a campaign.
Conversion rate is also crucial in customer acquisition. Optimizing it lowers customer acquisition costs by revealing which aspects, when improved, will create the most straightforward path to gaining visitors.
That said, a conversion rate doesn’t always have to refer to a click — it can also mean conversion events further down the funnel.
For example, you can calculate the percentage of users who installed an app or completed an in-app action. That way, you’ll identify valuable users and feed this information into the funnel to improve targeting and optimize campaign performance.
Monitor Your Ad Conversion Tracking
Conversion tracking lets you see what happens after a customer interacts with your ads — whether they signed up for your newsletter, purchased a product, downloaded your app, or made a call to your company.
With such information, you can adjust your budget, keywords, bidding, and other aspects to optimize your ad campaigns. It’ll also help you apply the strategies of your more successful marketing campaigns to those that need improvement.
For example, UpCity shares that 47% of high-income earners pay more attention to ads around events, holidays, and special occasions than 34% of middle-income and 32% of lower-income earners.
If you have an e-commerce store, it makes sense to target high-income earners with your ads during holidays and events. During these periods, those with disposable income are more likely to purchase than those who are more careful with their finances.
Use “How Did You Find Out About Us?” Surveys
The “How did you find out about us?” survey is one of the most effective customer feedback tools businesses use to know more about their customer base. You can use a tool like Jotform Survey Maker to collect the answers you need from your customers.
Here’s an example:
You can feature this question as a standalone survey or include it in a feedback form before or after a transaction.
By knowing how customers discover your business, you can focus your customer service, marketing, and sales efforts on audiences and channels that are best for the company.
To make this question as effective as possible, you should understand the context in which your customers found you. One good question to ask, along with how customers found you, is what they were looking for when they first came across your website.
Did they find you while looking for a solution to a problem? Were they trying to acquire a new skill? Were they looking to replace a product or service they used with yours?
By understanding the context, you can direct your marketing efforts toward creating content that meets your customers’ needs.
Similarly, if they found you on specific platforms or websites, it’ll help you decide whether to publish guest posts, niche edits or invest more in link-building with the websites.
Leverage Phone Tracking
Phone tracking lets you track which marketing activities generate calls and spark interest in potential customers. You can use a different phone number for each marketing channel and track incoming calls using call tracking software.
For example, someone who found your website through a Google Ad would call a different phone number from someone who found your business on Facebook. So, you’ll know which marketing campaign influenced the potential customer to contact your business.
With that, you can identify which ads, keywords, or campaigns successfully attract prospects to your business. You can then laser-focus your efforts to optimize those marketing strategies for more conversions, boosting your ROI.
That can be a game-changer for your business, resulting in better budget management and reducing customer acquisition costs.
Also, you can analyze details of a lost lead, including the service or product the caller was interested in. And use these details to create emails or retargeting ads that address their concerns.
On the other hand, if you are a small business, you can manage everything using a phone system. There are service providers who offer services calling, meeting, messaging, texting, and faxing to make everything simpler.
Use KPI Tracking
KPI tracking involves monitoring how key performance indicators (KPIs) change over time. Changes in KPIs can indicate which marketing programs are effective and which need to be improved.
Here are some crucial KPIs you should be tracking:
- Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI) — If you have a positive ROMI, your marketing campaigns generate a net profit over expenses.
- Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) — Increasing the CLV allows you to keep in touch with customers, reduce the rate of disengagement, and estimate a reasonable cost per acquisition.
- Lead Conversion Rate — This will help you understand how your sales funnel is performing and which campaign has the most significant impact on your marketing ROI.
- Cost per lead — This will help you make more data-driven decisions and have control of your advertising budget.
To choose efficient marketing KPIs, consider the following: What is the core purpose of your business? What results do you need to achieve for your business to grow?
Answering these questions will help you choose marketing KPIs that match your business objectives and environment.
Final Thoughts: Marketing Analytics — How To Track Your Marketing Activities
Measuring your marketing performance doesn’t have to be over-complicated — you just need a clear objective and plan to know how to revise your strategies and reallocate your budget accordingly.
The easiest way to track business analytics is through Google Analytics. It’s free, and Google provides several tools to get you started.
Which marketing analytics tracking method do you find the most effective? Share the post with your answers.
Author Bio:
Autumn, a graduate of the illustrious Howard University, is an Associate Marketing Manager and SEO Strategist on HubSpot’s Link Building team. When she’s not talking about link building or SEO, you can find her in the recording studio making R&B hits, traveling, or studying for law school. Keep up with Autumn on Instagram or LinkedIn.
