How To Successfully Track Your Marketing Dollars

 You’ve spent the time and brainpower building your marketing strategy, but can you track what your marketing dollars are getting you?

How to Successfully Track Your Marketing Dollars

One of the most overlooked pieces of a well-executed marketing campaign is the ability to see the results of your efforts. You can build the most elaborate marketing plan, but if you can’t track what’s working and what’s not, you are letting your marketing budget go to waste. With the right tool in place, you can increase the effectiveness of your campaign and allocate your marketing dollars wisely.

Marketing Dashboards

So how can you successfully track your marketing dollars?  Answer: A marketing dashboard.  At its core, a dashboard answers the question “how are we performing?” Much like the dashboard of your car, it helps guide the direction of your efforts by showing you what’s going on under the hood.

A dashboard is a reporting tool that provides instant and continuous visibility into all aspects of your campaign.  Inbound calls, online searches, and website traffic are all tracked and reported in one online application.  The ability to instantly monitor your results in real-time enables you to make data-driven decisions and maximize your ROI. Marketing dashboards are designed to track activity, provide analytics, and visualize performance.  These analytics can be further filtered by specific parameters such as location and timeframe, helping you make key decisions on your business.

Multiple marketing initiatives can be connected in dashboards, but below we are going to cover the main analytics to have in place for effective tracking.

Call Tracking

With call tracking, you have the ability to know where the call originated from. Call tracking works by creating a unique number and attaching it to each individual marketing initiative of your campaign.  The lead source can then be identified and tracked by its “new” number. In capturing this, you’re able to understand where your calls are coming from and which source is producing the most call volume.

Dashboards capture all your tracked calls and provide various reports to help analyze your data. You have the ability to not only view a total summary of incoming calls but separate your call volume by location. It also provides additional stats such as totally unique, or new customer calls, average duration, and how many calls were answered.  This is valuable in seeing how many customers were able to speak to someone at your business, and which opportunities were missed to voicemail.

Website Analytics

Another critical piece to a marketing dashboard is web analytics. This tells you who is coming to your website.  Website analytics provide data into new visitors as well as returning users, giving you further insight into how many new leads are making contact with your business online.

Web analytics also track page views and page sessions.  Pageviews is the number of times your webpage was loaded, whether clicking via a search or an internal or external link.  Page sessions are the user’s interaction with your website, meaning, the amount of time a user spent on any given page.  All this data gives you useful information on the user’s journey and how they got there.

Other Analytics

Whether you’re running a radio ad or a PPC campaign, nearly all marketing initiatives can be tracked within a marketing dashboard and customized based on what you want to track.  If you’ve set up a PPC campaign, you can monitor the performance of your ad and make any needed changes before costs add up.  Running an email campaign?  Key metrics can be set up to provide open and click rates, the number of leads generated, and list growth. You can also get in-depth information on which social media efforts are resulting in more traffic to your website.

A marketing dashboard can further break down data reporting by the week, month, and year.  This can assist in understanding what other external factors, such as the weather or time of year have any impact on the behavior of your customer and volume of your business.  Having this knowledge will help make better decisions on when to adjust your marketing.

Conclusion

The end goal of any campaign is more calls and more business.  When new prospects are calling your business it’s important to identify how they found you. Knowing where and which marketing initiative brought them to your business is critical to understating what area of your campaign is generating more leads.

As a digital agency, we utilize our own comprehensive dashboard, DASH, to help our clients get the most out of their marketing.  Our effective reporting tool provides immediate results right at their fingertips to help grow their business.

Interested in learning more about how DASH can help your business? Contact us to schedule a demo. https://fusiononemarketing.com/dash/