and Justifying Your Marketing Spend
Free 33 Minute Funnel Consultation
Before the invention of online marketing, the results of marketing campaigns were derived implicitly. Sure, millions of people saw the Slinky commercials, but did James Industries (Slinky’s manufacturer) really have a good way to measure how those commercials affected their sales?
Obviously, the beauty of online marketing is that you can track metrics, and this metric data can go a long way. Using:
- Landing pages
- Tracked links
- Funnel tracking tools
You can find out the conversion rate of each of your marketing channels. Channels can be anything from your banner ad campaign, to links on your social media profiles (we tracked a conversion last week that actually came from LinkedIn).
The best way to start doing this is by creating a landing page for each of your campaigns (see Unbounce – a great tool for A/B testing landing pages).This will help you optimize your conversion funnel for each of your marketing channels. You should also track each and every link you’ve put out on the web that leads to any page on your domain (see tracking for retargeting). This allows you to view which medium was used to access each of your landing pages. Lastly, you should track each step of your conversion funnel (some good tools for this are MixPanel and KISSMetrics). Most importantly, this shows you exactly how many people from each of your marketing channels actually converted, but it can also show you the pages that people from each of your channels are viewing.
Some conversion sources, however, can’t be tracked on your own end. ReTargeter offers the additional metric of view-through conversion tracking (see view-through conversion tracking for retargeting). This metric shows conversions that people made after seeing an impression, but then proceeded to type your website into the address bar a few minutes later. This can prove to be very valuable, as one of our clients has seen 20 view through conversions for every 3 click through conversions, and another has shown 3 click-through conversions for every 39 view-through conversions!
Tracking conversion data is key in justifying your spend on advertising. Optimizing your landing pages and conversion funnels, tracking all of your links, and using funnel tracking tools, are great ways to enhance your conversion tracking data. Additionally, utilizing ReTargeter’s view-through conversion data gives you additional data to help you understand your spend.
