Results & Tracking Your Marketing Efforts

The ultimate goal of your marketing efforts is to increase your company’s revenue. Your efforts to tie results and tracking together are important. At the same time, it is important to put into context what realistically can be tracked and when more subjective measures of success are appropriate.

Running a Perfect Marketing Campaign (aka Nirvana)

• You run a campaign.
• That campaign generates a lead that is fed into your CRM and assigned to a rep.
• The rep then converts that lead into a sale.
• Whoa, you are a revenue generation engineer/hero.

The reality is, that while you want to work toward this type of reporting, thinking that it is going to be what tells you the whole story or will carry the day is misleading. It is simply not that simple. See more in “Believers Win – Skeptics not so much” section of the eBook.

The more you track the better you will be able to see an ROI. It’s impossible to track everything.

Work as hard as possible to attach sales to the lead source because digital makes that more possible than ever. At the very least setup goals in Google Analytics to track form submissions, etc. A professional digital marketer can get much more sophisticated than just tracking these elements but it is a good place to start.

Recognize that you simply can’t fully track your ROI because it is not that simple

Attribution

Attribution – the concept of attribution is that a prospect may have interacted with many elements of your marketing efforts during the buying and selection process. If they do, what channel to you attribute the acquisition of the customer to?

It’s impossible to fully identify each interaction and impact that, that interaction had on the prospect.

Recognize the Short Comings of Tracking Applications

There are countless numbers of analytics applications that can be used to track the effectiveness of your digital marketing efforts. One of the most popular is Google Analytics. This can be very powerful to help understand how your site is being used, how it performs, etc. However, it can also be misleading if you are not clear on how to use the data and what data should be validated before being used to inform your marketing decision.

One of the most common mistakes I see is going to the bank with Google conversion tracking. When set up properly, Google Analytics can report on the number of forms people fill out when visiting your site; RFQ forms, contact forms, etc. However, if you do not validate the content of those forms/leads you will not be getting a clear picture of how your marketing efforts are performing.