The Importance of Tracking Online Advertising Campaigns

You may have a passion for online advertising, a lot of cool advertising ideas, and even a large budget to back your ad campaign. While all of these tools are awesome for helping you build your online marketing strategy, it is important to keep something in mind your mom has been telling you all along—stay organized. In other words, in order to make the most of your online advertising efforts, it’s extremely important to understand how to track and manage all of your advertising campaigns.

Why is tracking necessary?

First and foremost, tracking your data allows you to find out which of your marketing strategies are turning directly into results (aka paying costumers). For example, you may think you know what keywords are serving you best, but tracking data will tell you exactly how well each of your keywords are performing. Along the same lines, tracking allows you to find out information about your consumer. Once you understand key information about your customers, you can pour your budget into ads that are most relevant, and even personalized to your consumer. Simply put, tracking helps you gather the right information to make sure you are getting the most bang for your buck.

How do I track my online ad campaigns?

There are a myriad of ways to track your online advertising campaigns. Regardless of what tracking software you choose, make sure you are able to track the following, at a bare minimum:

• Cost of campaign
• Cost per sale
• Cost per click
• Number of clicks
• Number of sales
• Number of actions
• Total profit
• Total value of sales
• Return on investment

One of the most popular (and free) ways to track your online ad campaign is through Google Analytics. Google’s Advertising Analytics includes: AdWords, Content Reports, Social Analytics, Conversion Analytics, Mobile Analytics, and more. Each of these tools offer detailed information that help you measure sales, conversions, and help you understand how visitors use your site. Using these tools will help you make wise decisions about your online marketing strategy as a whole that will help you yield better results.

Testing Landing Pages with Google Analytics

While Google Analytics is extremely helpful, there is a slight learning curve involved to help you understand the ins and outs of each report.

As a quick example of how detailed each of the reports in Google Analytics can get, consider the benefits of using the “Content” tab in Google Analytics to test the success of your landing pages. Once you click on “Landing Page,” you can view the number of visitors, the average time visitors spend on the site, the percentage of new visitors, pages per visit, and bounce rate.

By understanding and analyzing these data (especially the bounce rate), you can find out some important information about your landing page. For example, you can determine if the keywords directing visitors to your page are relevant, if the landing page design is intuitive, and if the content is clear and includes a strong call to action. As a result, you can make the changes necessary to draw more relevant customers to your site.

What now?

When all is said and done, one of the best ways to continuously improve your online marketing strategy is to utilize a tracking system like Google Analytics. Using important data helps you understand how your current strategy is performing on the Internet, and what changes you can make to get better results.