Four Marketing Tracking Methods to Improve Your Campaigns

Before launching your campaign, even before you start the framework, the first step in any data-driven marketing campaign should be to define goals and understand how they will be measured.  Your goals will dictate what metrics are important to your team and therefore, will drive the marketing tracking software you will use.

For example, when we outlined our latest project, we spent some time thinking about the overall goals for the campaign. We decided that we wanted to encourage prospects to sign up for a demo of our call tracking software. In order to track this effort, we identified campaign-specific metrics that would demonstrate success and the marketing tracking tools to measure the ROI of our endeavor.

Campaign specific metrics

We use Marketo to track our leads, all of them, including offline leads like phone calls. Data-driven marketers know that you can’t run a successful campaign unless you are tracking phone calls, and that’s why it’s one of the top call tracking metrics to measure. In order to see our total number of leads on any campaign, we integrated CallRail with Marketo to push calls into our lead funnel as a lead activity, capturing source level information to complete the attribution cycle. Because of this integration, we can track the following:

• Total of Leads – Whether your incoming leads are trash or treasures, it is important to know the total number of leads your campaign is pulling in. You’ll want to have this in order to calculate your lead to MQL to close ratio later. This metric can be tracked in your CRM or marketing automation software.
• Marketing Qualified Leads –  We use Marketo to build a lead scoring system that pinpoints  the leads we need to take action on automatically. This type of marketing tracking helps marketers know what kind of campaigns or initiatives win in turning prospects into hot leads and directs the flow and content of successful nurture programs.
• Closed leads – With the power of our integrated marketing tracking stack, we are able to set certain triggers to automatically close a lead as won. Being able to understand and prove which marketing initiatives drive the most closed leads will help you plan your marketing strategy with more confidence and celebrate your wins!
• Marketing Acquisition Cost – Getting down to dollars and cents, lastly, we determine how many marketing dollars were spent to acquire the customer. Understanding this metric will not only help marketers prepare a budget down the road when the team launches other campaigns, but it will help them develop a sense of marketing investment needed in order to attract customers in the future.

Social metrics

Marketing tracking for social can help identify the impact that tweets, shares, posts, have not only on brand awareness and sentiment but also on the bottom line. Having an understanding of how your business is perceived across the social audience is important in building a connection with and confidence in the brand. Tracking the rate at which a business gains fans or followers and the degree to which followers engage with the brand via social, will provide clues to the relevance of the information being sent out into the world.

By setting up goals in Google Analytics and tying them to the initiatives in Twitter, Facebook, and the like, marketers can see when social campaigns made a direct contribution to business objectives. This can be done using UTMs. Google Analytics shows the impact social has on your bottom line by breaking down traffic by channel.

No mention of social is complete without addressing the support aspect that businesses and consumers alike are implementing to mitigate and resolve issues. This is an opportunity for marketers to differentiate the company by building a process for how marketing and support/customer service teams work together to respond quickly to issues. This metric might be better suited in a support/customer service team however, it has major implications on how the brand is perceived and should be closely monitored with the marketing team.

Website metrics

Making sure to track website metrics is a marketing tracking must. As marketers get closer to understanding the number of unique visitors to a particular page and bounce rate, it is easier to identify and understand trends in traffic to the site, as well as assist in indicating the completeness of information on the page. Similar to social metrics, goals can be created in Google Analytics around sales objectives tied into actions taken on the website to prove the value that the website brings to the bottom line.

Email Marketing and Newsletter Metrics

Newsletters are vital to your communication mix but how do you know what is working? Your audience doesn’t care how many hours went into creating images, crafting text, etc. They care about how the contents will make their life easier and it is your job to give the masses, more specifically your customers and potential customers, what they want. Email marketing and newsletter tracking is simple when you have the right tools.

We send out our communications through Marketo. In Marketo, we track open and click-through rates. These metrics are worth tracking in order to perform A/B tests. Through A/B testing our newsletter subject lines, we discovered that our open rates increased when we used straight-forward business focused language rather than humor. Additionally, when testing the click-through rates on our call to actions (CTAs), we realized that the rate increased when clever, actionable text such as “OPTIMIZE NOW” was used instead of overused phrases like, “READ MORE” or “LEARN MORE”.

Tracking subscribe and unsubscribe numbers provides a good indicator of interest, list relevance, and the overall health of marketing lists, which can be tracked in Marketo as well. Significant list growth or decay should be addressed and interpreted as these can be tell-tale signs that your newsletter campaign needs attention.

For example, we wanted to grow our newsletter marketing list and launched a campaign to drive sign ups. After one month, we checked back in on our marketing tracking sheet to determine how we were pacing and unfortunately, we found out that we were not growing the list. After researching possibilities, we realized that the signup page lacked flair. We gave the page a makeover, including reasons why marketers should sign up, and even giving previews into the tips that are shared in the newsletter, all in the effort to drive more eyeballs to our materials and to provide resources to marketers. After the updated page was launched, we immediately began seeing an increase in the number of subscribers we received.

Marketing Tracking For Calls

Our ability to track leads at the granular level we do is all made possible through our highly integrated marketing stack. CallRail’s integrations enable a phone call’s lead source, whether online (through a landing page or via PPC) or offline (sales collateral, business cards, or tv and radio commercials) to be tracked and recorded in most CRMs or marketing automation software. Marketers see the full story of their prospect’s journey throughout the cycle. The result? This marketing tracking tool provides better clarity into what keywords drive prospects to websites, what inspires the phone calls and thus, what performs best to close more deals.

Want to track the full metrics behind your marketing? Get started with CallRail, and start integrating your data to improve your marketing tracking.