subject: How to effectively track and monitor your online marketing campaigns [print this page] How to effectively track and monitor your online marketing campaigns
Online marketing can be a quite complex topic, particularly when you start to adopt a multi0channel approach and begin targeting users through various different mediums including Search Engine Optimisation, Pay Per Click Marketing (PPC), E-Mail Marketing, Display Advertising, Affiliate Marketing and so on. One of the main things that you need to ensure you have in place is effective tracking functionality you need to be able to determine where your marketing budget is best spent and you can do this by establishing which channels are contributing the most to your online profits. One of the most popular online tracking options is Google Analytics, you can use analytics to tag up all of your various campaigns, including channels within Google itself like Google Product Search or Google News.
One of the first things you need to do with your analytics is ensure you effectively segment yor traffic into distinct sources. One of the main problems many webmasters have when they first begin tracking multiple campaigns is that they notice all the traffic coming through their website is coming through one or only a few sources. Google Analytics can essentially account for a range of different sources including direct traffic, referral traffic, organic traffic and paid traffic. It's important to autotag all of your paid campaigns to ensure that traffic garnered through search is apportioned to the correct source. Similarly, if you have a product search campaign then you should use the Google URL builder to create the necessary tracking parameters to make sure this traffic comes through as "base feed" or something similar.
Finally, if you are using e-mail marketing in your campaigns, you can perhaps rely on additional tracking from your e-mail marketing software provider. Many software providers will allow you to track your various campaigns and will provide data on how often users have opened your e-mails, purchased through your campaigns or even just clicked on your links. This tracking iwll enable you to make strategic decisions over whether you should continue with a particular campaign or whether you should confine it to the scrap heap.
