Track all the Things: Tools for a Better ROI
Posted on August 26, 2019
Work smarter, not harder. Today, we live in a world full of new online tools and resources. From tools that will help you spy on your competition to those that record how users interact with your website. There are many marketing tools out there to help you better analyze data and make informed educated decisions to improve marketing success. Join us as we take a look at some of the tools our experts use that can help you achieve a better ROI of your digital marketing efforts.
In this webinar, you will learn the inside scoop on what tools our experts are using, and how they’re using them.
Why Reporting Sucks:
It all comes back to data. How to read it, how to interpret it. There are so many questions marks out there. Figuring out what the actual ROI means, what’s good or bad and how to track across systems can be very difficult. We’ll be talking about the issues and how to answer these questions.
Google Tag Manager
By default, Google analytics will track things for you. You can view all of the information about behaviors in that platform. However, it is not all-encompassing. Certain things won’t be tracked. Tag Manager allows you to tag little items on your website and track them as events within Google Analytics.
Some other cool things Tag Manager includes are:
- Scroll depth tracking – if you’re trying to get people to get to a certain point on a page, this feature will help to see how far people are getting before exiting.
- Element visibility – you can tag and look at certain elements to get a good sense of if things aren’t being seen and make informed edits to your layouts.
- You can track video views – not only can you see if people are clicking to play the video and you can also see how far people are watching them for. This helps to show how valuable your content is.
- Track interactions with downloads – PDF’s, anything that is normally not trackable in analytics.
Google Analytics
This is the all-encompassing hub of your data.
What to look at:
- Channels report – you are able to see how much traffic is coming in from specific channels and is it effective at driving goals and converting potential customers. You can also compare channels to see the conversion rates and by channel to see where you’re excelling or falling behind.
- Landing pages report – Typically we look at this report with an advanced segment on, so here we’re looking at organic traffic. You always want to do this on a per-channel basis.
- Events – You can see your top events, for example – downloads, pop-ups, etc. This is good information to have but isn’t necessarily as important as a goal.
- Goals – You can look at the overview report. You set these goals up and track whatever you’d like (form completions, engaged users, etc.) These will be whatever is most important to your company.
- Behavior Flow – You are able to see the path of users and what pages they visited in order. It will show you where people are getting stuck or disinterested. This report may help understand the flow of your customer a little better and how edits or changes could help their journey.
Data Accuracy – these are some of the most common things we run across.
- Google Analytics does not equal Google Ads
- Duplicate Google Analytics code
- Missing Google Analytics code
- Limitations of data (ave. time on site)
Campaign Tracking – UTM Codes
This is a tool that Google has to help with 3rd party tracking. You can choose the website, the URL and this tool will spit out and start tracking within GA. You can see specifically what campaigns you’re tracking and get all types of data including conversions. This is a great, easy solution to help fill in the gaps.
Search Console
When you log in, you can go to the performance report – which will tell you the specific search terms that people use over the time period you choose. what you can do is to filter by pages to see what particular terms people are using to get there. Search Console helps you reclaim some of the keyword data that was lost. It’s also a great tool for figuring out the type of content you should create for the future. One more thing you can do is to link this to Google Analytics and Google Ads so they’re all in one spot.
Google Ads
Look at search terms versus bid terms. If you’re bidding on a term, someone could be typing in all sorts of variations of that term that could trigger the bid term. You can look specifically to see what people are actually typing. You are also able to filter out things that are irrelevant. Additionally, if you see a lot of who, what, why – you may be able to provide a solution or answer to what people are searching for. If it comes down to one thing, try to understand the intent of each search term you’re bidding on.
Competitor Tracking
It’s really important to know how to track what the competition is doing and benchmark where you’re at.
Tools to use:
- Spyfu
- SEMRush
- MOAT
- Google Keyword Planner
Brand Awareness: How many people are searching your name versus your competitors. Doing this and benchmarking the results will give you an easy way to check on your performance in the marketplace.
One of the core things we look at is how much organic search traffic comes through for you versus your competition. A lot of the tools are based on top keywords without having insights into analytics so they are estimates but still valuable. You can also do a deep dive to see where you are ranking and where a lot of the traffic is coming from, including how much includes searches for brand names or not. Some of these tools will also show you where your competition may be using PPC, what they’re paying for and ads they are running.
Inspectlet
This is a great tool that will record what your users are doing on your website. You are able to watch someone’s screen as they go through your website. It gives you a ton of insight as to how people are using things through click or scroll heat maps, eye tracking, and progression through the user experience.
Things to think through:
- Where are people getting lost?
- Are buttons taking them to the wrong place or where they expected to go?
- Do they seem to be hunting down certain information that they can’t find?
- Are they repeatedly scrolling up and down?
Sprout Social
This is a great tool for social media scheduling, tracking and analyzing, through tagging and a very interactive platform for teams. You are able to customize your experience and set up alerts to keep you at the top of your mentions and social presence.
When we’re setting up the ads in LinkedIn – all you’re seeing initially are charts on how many people clicked the ad, how much you paid for it, etc. If you dive deeper you’ll be able to find out who is actually interacting. You may see things like the company or the job title. You then compare these to what you’re trying to target and you can start refining based on that.
Conversions – you can track conversions from people who viewed your ad, not just who clicked.
So those are just some of our favorite tools to use for tracking all of the things. If you have any questions or would like more information into any of these tools, please contact us. We’re also offering a free Digital Marketing Audit which could help give you a better idea of how you stack up to your competition.
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