Improve your online sales and marketing tracking

There are so many different ways to spend online marketing budgets, without tracking the performance of different channels it’s impossible to really know which of your spends is doing well.

Master conversion tracking with Google Analytics

By far the most widely used web site tracking system is Google Analytics, it’s powers are vast and almost as widely under utilised. So let’s cover off a simple situation and how you can expand your use of Google Analytics.

Say you have just two campaigns running, one is a newsletter out to your clients that you publish every month, the other is a modest spend on Google Adwords. Obviously there is a fixed cost on Adwords but your newsletter also costs you time to write and publish, so how can you determine which one is working?

“Working” is the important concept here. Just getting people to your web site is one thing but let’s say your objective is to have users make an enquiry, you’ve got a simple enquiry form already setup on your web site.

When people fill in the enquiry form, you can send through as hidden data, tracking information from Google Analytics. So the result will be alongside the enquiry you will see how the user came to be on your web site.

For example, you can see if:-

• the user came from a google search on the keyword “bla”
• the user came from a link in your newsletter
• the user came from clicking on an Adwords ad that you have running

click to view larger

A working example

Take a look at the screen shot opposite, this is an enquiry that’s been generated on our other web site theDMA.com.au where we build WordPress sites for customers.

Alongside the enquiry you also get tracking data, in this example we can see that he’s click on an Adwords ad (CPC means cost per click), the source was Google and the search term that the user searched for was “wordpress”.

How to set this up in WordPress?

Our Google Analytics Tracking For Forms plugin makes this possible, simply by obtaining data from the analytics already running on the web site and sending that data along side an enquiry form.

It’s a sure fire way to see which enquiries from your web site have originated from particular sources. If you have your sales or marketing people track this information you can begin to generate a picture of what is working and what is not.