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Acquisition Tracking – Where Do Your Customers Come From?
Most businesses undertake some form of acquisition tracking:
1. Manual In-House Tracking – having a process in place whereby the customer or prospect is being asked where they first heard of your company. Recorded over time, this data can be analysed to determine the most effective channel that is driving new business.
2. Automated Call Tracking – you use a call tracking provider to log call information such as where the caller was based, duration of call, time of call. This provides useful insight so you can gain a better understanding of which marketing campaign is converting more prospects to call.
3. Website & Digital Campaign Tracking – Utilising tools such as Google Analytics which provide in-depth insight into user behaviour, engagement, acquisition and conversions.
Aligning metrics to business goals
Whether you use just one, or all three tracking methods, it is really important to focus on the metrics that mean the most to you. Whatever metrics you choose to measure, they need to be the right metrics for your business, so setting Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) will ensure you are using metrics that aligned to your core business goals. If your company’s overall goal is to increase profits, then your marketing metrics should show how your campaigns contributed to profits.
Tracking customers from all sources
With all the tracking and insight available to measure on-line acquisition, it can be easy to forget that some customers may have first seen your brand in a local magazine, at an event or via word of mouth recommendation. Once this interaction has taken place, they may have then checked out your website, called directly or visited your store. Should these conversions be attributed to the ‘last-action’ or should you analyse this cross-channel conversion more closely to get a much clearer picture on what is working best to drive sales?
It can be difficult to track cross-channel conversions, but with third party analytics software it is possible, and once you gain a deeper understanding of who your customers are, how they search and their buying behaviours, you can develop a more strategic approach to your marketing.
Using Benchmarks
A colleague may present you with some data on a Facebook campaign which resulted in 6,000 page views. How do you know if 6,000 page views is good? Looking for benchmarks is highly recommended – research comparable companies, look at levels of engagement on posts with similar topic/context. This will give you a really good indication on whether 6,000 page views can be classified as a success.
Consider Customer Lifetime Value
Customer Lifetime Value is an important metric if you want to better understand how much value individual customers provide. Some customers, or types of customers, may be more profitable than others. Learning how you acquired them, their value, and how much more revenue you can generate from them will reduce your costs and increase your profits.
Track online conversions using Google Analytics – Its Free!
Google Analytics is a free tool that will help you to improve your customer’s experience and monitor the results of your online marketing campaigns.
You have access to lots of user data through Google Analytics, and can customise the reports so they provide you with insight on the metrics that matter most.
Calculating ROI
When running digital marketing campaigns, attributing value to conversions is really important as you can then calculate the return on investment.
There are different ways in which to calculate Return on Investment (ROI), and the method you use will largely depend on the type of product or service you are selling, and if there are variables in the conversion value.
Basic ROI Calculation = Revenue – Investment / Investment = ROI %
This calculation is a basic ROI calculation. It doesn’t take into account all overheads and management costs, but it does provide a good indicator on the effectiveness of the campaign. If you wanted to present a more accurate ROI calculation you would also need to take into account all overheads, management costs and any other outgoings associated with running the campaign into the ‘Investment’ cost.
ROI will help you to better understand which campaigns are out-performing and which are under-performing so you can re-align budgets to put more into campaigns that are performing well and are generating more revenue.
Whizz Marketing is a certified Google Partner Agency. If you are keen to better understand your customers and increase the return on your marketing investment, then please get in touch. We will be delighted to work with you on creating a focused strategy that can be monitored and measured to help achieve your business goals. Please visit www.whizzmarketing.co.uk or call Louise on 01252 622129.
Telephone No.01252 622129
