There is nothing more valuable than knowing the results of your marketing efforts. Tracking your results is the best way to improve your next campaign. Here are 4 tools you can use to easily get started in measuring your marketing campaigns!
1. Social Analytics
Each social channel typically has its own analytics tool built-in. These native social analytics provide a great way to get some quick facts about how effective your efforts are on these channels and discover potential areas for improvement.
For example, Twitter analytics can show you all sorts of great information about your performance:
- Profile visits over time
- Mentions and engagement
- Individual and cumulative Tweet impressions and engagement
- Top Tweets per month
- Follower growth
- Video content performance
- Conversion tracking
You can use these Twitter analytics to see what’s working and what’s not. Some account insights are only available on the platform’s mobile app, such as Instagram’s analytics tool. Check out each of your social channels and use the tools they give you to measure your efforts.
2. Google Analytics
Here is the meat and potatoes of your tracking efforts. Better yet, this tool is free! Google Analytics is your way of tracking how people are interacting with your website. If you don’t already use it, you should know that you can find out things like:
- Where your visitors are on your site right now
- How long they spend on your site
- How many pages they viewed
- What pages they viewed (your blog? Your newsletter sign-up form? Product detail pages?)
- If they were on mobile, desktop, or tablet
- Where they came from (Google? Facebook? A partner company’s website?)
These are just a few of the things you can do with Google Analytics, but this powerful tool can do much more. You have an opportunity here to really learn about how people use your website.
At Getfused, we compile regular reports for many of our clients to help them really understand all their Google Analytics data and find actionable items to improve their marketing efforts. Get in touch with us to learn more about how we can help you track your marketing efforts.
3. Campaign URLs
If we had to pick one piece of advice to emphasize for every client, it would be this: use campaign URLs! We can’t recommend this often enough.
Campaign URLs allow you to track your marketing efforts on a more granular level and understand how effective they are at bringing relevant users to your website. All you have to do is fill in the form on Google’s Campaign URL Generator with the following information:
- Website URL: where you want to send someone on your website
- Campaign Source: the platform where you’re sharing the link, like Facebook or your newsletter
- Campaign Medium: the method you use to share the link, like CPC, social, or QR.
- Campaign Name: the name you choose to identify your campaign
You can add other campaign information besides these required fields. As you fill this form, Google will generate a URL that you can use in your marketing materials, and voila! Your new stats will now show up in your Google Analytics profile, and you can see how well your campaigns are working.
Our suggestion: bookmark Google’s Campaign URL Generator and never forget it!
4. Free Hashtag Tracking Tools
Whether you’re an expert hashtag user (hashtagger?) or you hardly understand them at all, free hashtag tracking tools will help. Use tools like Social Searcher, All Hashtag, One Million Tweet Map, and Twubs to discover how hashtags are being used on Twitter and other social media platforms.
These tools can help you see which hashtags are popular, other relevant hashtags, or popularity over time. Instead of guessing at which hashtags might be good to use, you can use solid, real-time data to make informed decisions that will help you navigate the ever-changing algorithms of social media platforms.
If you need more advanced hashtag tracking performance, such as email alerts or custom hashtag monitoring, you may need to invest in premium paid tools. Alternatively, you can contact us to talk about how we can help you with social listening and monitoring.
Social listening and monitoring can help you track campaign performance, brand conversation, and much more. You can also take other kinds of measurements, such as owned media analytics, general conversation levels, and potential influencers engaging in conversations or interacting with your content.
The bottom line: you should track your marketing efforts! There are plenty of free tools ready for you to use, and new and interesting tools are coming out all the time.
