By Anthony Lambrianos – Week 12 – s3668693 – Digital Marketing
Todays Blog is going to focus on a few ways to track your digital marketing progress. According to Jon Simpson from the Forbes Council, this is more formally known as marketing analytics, which are measurements of marketing efforts and successes, often requiring the collection of data on buyers experiences with the business and actual marketing actions of the business. This data can be found through many various routes which we will focus on more through out the blog. Having the ability to gather this data, aggregate and calculate it, allows businesses to gain insight into what exactly is successful, what needs improvement and the obvious returns on your digital marketing methods.
The first way to get an idea of how your digital marketing is going, is by looking at the overall website traffic. Generally most digital marketing efforts look to drive consumers towards your website. According to Sonia Gregory regular monitoring of the websites traffic gives you a number of insights such as which campaigns are working and when. Another way to check Digital marketing progress is by looking at traffic by source. Essentially this allows you to see exactly where you visitors are coming from, it can be used to see which sources are working and which ones require improvement, allowing you to narrow down spending of money and time. The four main sources tracked by Google Analytics are as follows:
- Organic Search – They clicked on a link provided by a search engine that brought them to your website.
- Direct Visitors – They typed your URL directly into the search bar or have it bookmarked.
- Referrals – They were sent to your website when the clicked on a link provided by a different website.
- Social – They came to your website via social media.
Another method of tracking Digital marketing efforts is Ad Network Conversion Tracking. All ad networks, including Google AdWords, Facebook Ads, Bing Ads, etc. allow you to activate and use conversion tracking. According to Kate Lombardo this is imperative as it allows to view how effective your campaign is in sections like phone calls, website purchases, newsletter sign-ups, app downloads and various other things.
Overall, there are way more tracking methods, however, after completing all of those its important to participate in Key Performance Indicator (KPI) tracking. Any point of data that gives you possible insight into the performance of your marketing can be considered a key performance indicator. KPI tracking allows you to record all the data from your tracking methods and put them into a list, whereby you can use the list to gauge the effectiveness of your digital marketing efforts.
With digital marketing its clear that there are many ways to track progress, often built into the different methods used to make progress. Personally, as a digital marketer I feel that the importance of tracking your progress/success is imperative to ensuring you meet your objectives and doing so in an efficient manor whereby you are not wasting resources on the wrong marketing efforts but rather using them where they are needed most to gain the most benefit. I appreciate you all reading my Week 12 blog, and would love to hear your thoughts on the various tracking methods and whether you feel its important to use them.
Kind regards, Anthony Lambrianos – s3668693 – Week 12 – Digital Marketing Blog
Anthonys Blog 
Great blog once again Ant, I’m looking at doing some tracking for my own digital efforts in order to see if its really worth all the time and money being put in, What are the best programs or services to track user engagement with content going forward?
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Thanks for the comment Steve, very interesting question, the two major programs I’ve seen are mixpanel and manageengine, both great tools in monitoring consumer patterns and such when engaging with your business digitally.
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Thank you for the response Anthony, I will look into those going forward, finally before making a move I wanted to ask you one last question, for a small business like my own is tracking really worth the cost?
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Personally, that’s a tough question for me to answer without knowing the business itself, however, I can that even for small businesses tracking help to make changes in your business efforts that could reduce costs and increase sales/profits. The nice thing is there are many options that are free for novice users with small businesses and also some actual service experts who cost less then $800 per annum. There you can seek professional help for a low cost. I personally would invest to ensure that no money is being wasted on pointless digital marketing efforts and that you are also targeting the right people and types of digital advertising for your business.
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Hey Anthony, loved the blog this week! It was so interesting to found out about the different ways in which a user can come across your website, and how each website is able to track this. Which avenue do you think is most important for a business? I personally think optimizing traffic from organic searches should be the focal point of any good digital marketing strategy.
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Thank you so much for your comment Stellios, I totally agree with you, the focus should definitely be on organic searches, as you want people to see your store first when searching for anything related to your product. A large percentage of internet traffic goes through search engines, so having a strong organic search strategy will help you gain the attention of a substantial amount of potential consumers. However, after that is optimised the business should look at some other areas where it may be lacking.
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Thanks for responding, what would you say is the next major focus after optimizing organic search keeping in mind the objective is to retain new customers?
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Once again a great question, personally if I were running my own business, my objective after tracking and optimizing organic search would be to ensure the website that consumers arrive at after searching is outstanding, easy to use, appealing to the eye, and offers a way for consumers to leave feedback. The objective here is to make consumers who come to the page feel enticed to purchase something, and then by following their feedback we are able to meet their needs and create strong relationships, thus creating a frequent buyers.
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Great reading your blog this week, I look forward to seeing more content like this in the future. Back in my day tracking was a lot more difficult then it is now, amazing to see how its come so far. Is it really true that you can track people through social media?
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Yes Robin that is correct, Digital tracking has become incredibly easy so much so that a teenage student can participate. Yes, it is true that tracking of social media entries into your website is possible, often its done through the social media app itself, or the portal entries of the website. Its amazing how smart technology has come so far from 50 years ago.
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