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How to track your return on marketing investment

It’s online marketing focus week on Bdaily. Here, Raj Rajput, a sales and marketing professional with Mercia Group, analyses offline and online tracking methods.

The measurement of results in digital marketing is relatively straight forward if you know about the range of analytical tools available to you.

If you decided to create measures for success but then found it hard to track the data needed for demonstrating success, what can you do to better identify the data and make sense of it?

Your digital data can be found in tracking methods such as Google Analytics for websites, apps and campaigns, but your offline marketing may not be so easy but there are ways to link online and offline marketing activity.

Using QR Codes and Special Code Online Redemption Coupons QR codes are a useful method of collecting data and inspiring tech savvy users to use their mobile phones to link to your marketing channels.

QR codes are useful in printed literature as they are a quick way to get the user to interact providing there is an incentive for the user to use their smartphone device to scan your code. This can be anything from a special offer mechanism to playing a video or downloading a brochure. If the incentive is attractive enough then the user will engage.

QR codes can be linked to Google Analytics as the link can have a tracking code created using either Google URL shortener or Campaign builder and I shall explain both.

Google URL Shortener

This is a tool that can be found in by googling “Google URL Shortener” and you will need to be logged into your Gmail account to get it into your Google account.

You will need to have a URL link to your destination and as they tend to be generally quite long this tool will shorten them for you and track the number of clicks. This is an ideal solution if you want a quick view of the number of clicks for your link and will look like this:

If you double click on details you will get a basic Google Analytics interface with some basic tracking details and a QR code already generated for you!

This level of details is fine for quick information about your campaign and especially if you need low level quick data. The QR code is already generated for you so you can start using it in your printed material to start tracking your offline success!

Google Campaign Code Generator

If you have a specific campaign you want to track and get more insight into web activity then the Google Campaign Code Generator will help you do that.

You will see a form with the following fields:

In order to understand these fields you can see from the graphic below which fields to use for example for which type of campaign:

Once you entered the details above you can then generate a unique URL to use with you advertising banners, links in emails or Google ad campaigns to name a few. The result will be a long URL which you can shorten using the Google URL shortener we discussed earlier. The output results can be viewed in Google Analytics as below:

The information is found in your Traffic Sources column under Campaigns and you will see the data output that will help you evaluate the success of your campaigns.

The key to getting the best out of all this tracking is always be testing and understanding the data against any other information you can generate from your campaigns. Offline data is just as powerful as online data, so for instance if you can survey a sample of your customers, then you can get powerful information from both sources to help you evaluate your return on investment and improve your campaign performance.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Mercia Group .