The importance of tracking your marketing campaigns Utilizing web analytics to optimize your online and offline marketing efforts.	Visited: 878 Not rated Rate: Select 1 - Terrible 2 - Poor 3 - Average 4 - Good 5 - Outstanding
by Adam Henige June 03, 2008

I suppose it shouldn't shock me anymore, but I have to say that I am still surprised every time I see the looks of wonder and shock on the faces of business people when I explain the wealth of information made available via web analytics. The past few years I have worked for clients ranging from billion dollar market leaders to startups with limited resources, and nearly every time the subject of analytics comes up, my clients are amazed at the amount of actionable information available to them. Want to know if your advertising campaigns are creating awareness and driving sales? Want to know how interest in your product lines differs by geography? Web analytics can provide this information and so much more.

I would be lying if I told you there isn't an abundance of articles already available pertaining to this topic, but I feel it is my duty as a marketer to get up on my soapbox and let people know what they're missing. From experience I know the term "web analytics" itself can be a bit off-putting to the uninitiated, conjuring up nightmares of high school or college statistics classes, confusing logarithms and the like. But let it be said that with the tools, technologies and expertise available in the marketplace today, readily digestible, and more importantly, valuable information can be gleaned from your website regardless of whether you are a company of five or five thousand. I could go on at length on this subject area, but for today I will focus on one key point, return on investment for advertising.

The first point, to me, is the most straightforward way for marketers to bring accountability to their ad expenditures. Even today, many companies of all sizes are simply spending to spend, and not effectively tracking the results of that expenditure. Historically, this has been a difficulty in marketing as trying to gauge how many people actually see or hear television, radio or newspaper ads and how much business is generated from those advertisements.
The beauty of the Internet is that it does provide measurability for not only your online advertising efforts, but can also assist in your offline efforts. For firms purchasing web advertising or utilizing paid search campaigns, there are many options for continuously tracking and optimizing these expenditures to get the most bang for your buck.

Modern analytics programs allow you to track referrers, meaning that you can see exactly how many clicks come from different advertisements you have bought on other sites. Baseline statistics will usually provide this and often times the amount of traffic and the keywords used to reach your site. This provides a good idea of the number of clicks your site is able to draw, but web analytics can provide much more. For companies with the resources, there are more sophisticated analytics packages that will allow you track the activity of visitors from any campaign you are running after they've reached the site. For companies lacking the resources, there are countless providers who can offer these services at reasonable prices (even for larger firms, outsourcing this work is often more cost effective than maintaining in-house staff).

So why is this important? For the same reason you don't track the success of a sales person by the number of contacts they've made. It's one thing to make an impression, it's another thing to make a sale. If one of your ads gets clicked on 2,000 times but none of those visitors progress to even view a product, let alone buy something, then it's probably time to rethink the ad. Perhaps you are landing visitors on the wrong page, or perhaps the advertisement itself is misleading. With analytics, you can make adjustments to all of these variables and then see how those changes affect business results. If you can't make progress, perhaps it's time to spend your money elsewhere.

So given this information, it's fairly obvious that web analytics will help you measure your search engine and online advertising campaigns, but how can it help to measure your traditional campaigns? With a little creativity, web analytics can provide a lot of valuable information on the performance of print, direct mail, or radio advertising. At its simplest, creating a unique URL used in your advertising (with a corresponding page on your site), such as www.yoursite.com/sale, will allow you to track how many visitors entered at that page. Not only will this give you a rough idea of how many people acted on that piece of advertising, you can then track how many of those visitors proceeded to whatever the goal of the campaign was (a completed lead form, an informational page, a product purchase, etc.). Advanced tracking techniques would also allow for the ability to see how many of those visitors came back after an initial visit to perform the desired action. In this example, the marketer is able to get a much better idea of the effectiveness of a campaign. Armed with this data, successful campaigns can be mimicked or expanded while those that are ineffective can be altered or eliminated.

Essentially, most organizations use the web as a channel for growth, with advertising the tool to create awareness and qualify potential customers. Missing the boat by not utilizing web analytics in unison with online and offline advertising likely means you are throwing at least part of your money away at campaigns that are not helping you grow your business. Ultimately, the question is whether you are getting a return on your investment with your advertising, and web analytics is a powerful tool to make sure you do.

The author of this article is a managing partner with Netvantage Marketing, an Internet marketing consulting firm specializing in paid search management and web analytics based in Okemos, Michigan.