04 Intro to Tracking

As a business you probably know your income and your expenses. In digital marketing there are some numbers we want to keep an eye on too.

Here’s the big concept with tracking:

If we know what’s working…we can do more of it. It’s really that simple.

The tricky part is getting everything tracked and measured. Luckily we have Google Analytics to do a lot of the heavy lifting for us.

Before you start tuning out, give it a chance. I promise to be gentle.

As scary as Google Analytics may look at first, let’s dive in to my favorite numbers.

Watch the video for a quick walk through of my favorites. Here’s the gist of where traffic comes from:

Direct means someone opened a web browser and typed in your URL directly…or they had your site bookmarked.

Social, as you might guess, means the visitor was on a social network, such as Facebook, and clicked on a link that took them to your website.

Organic Search is basically traffic from people doing a Google or Bing search and finding your site.

Paid Search is kind of a catch-all for paid traffic – such as from google ads.

Referral is traffic coming from another site. Let’s say you were mentioned on a blogger’s website. Their site would show up as a referral source.

And Email…people clicked to your website from an email campaign, for example.

So when I talk about “knowing your numbers” it’s really a question of knowing your baseline. By knowing these basic metrics you can see when the traffic fluctuates. And as it shifts up and down you’ll start seeing what’s working really well and what you’re wasting your time and money on.

Here’s a quick example.

Say you drop $500 on a Facebook ad and you set the campaign to track and optimize for clicks. It’s super common. In Facebook you might see that you got 2500 clicks on the ad. You’d be thrilled with this because that’s 20 cents per click. Pretty darn good.

But, now that you know to look in Google Analytics, you might find that the 2500 clicks, or visits, hardly spent ANY time on your site and they certainly didn’t turn into sales or leads. So would you spend the $500 again on the same campaign? Probably not.

So the Facebook data only told you PART of the story.

And that, my friends, is how you optimize your digital marketing.

If you’re up for homework, check to see if you have Google Analytics installed. If you are unsure, book a session and we’ll setup a time to hook that up for you.

We offer complimentary basic tracking setup. It’s THAT important that we offer it for free. So if you aren’t sure about it, schedule a quick session through the link on this page and we’ll walk you through it.