Track Website Traffic from Specific Marketing Campaigns

Are you specifically trying to get people to visit your website using various tactics such as direct mail or other promotions? In this episode of The Compete Marketing Group Show, you’re going to learn how to know exactly how many people visit your website from each of these activities and also how to know what results each activity has produced for your business.

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Are you specifically trying to get people to visit your website using various tactics such as direct mail or other promotions? Today you’re going to learn how to know exactly how many people visit your website from each of these activities and also how to know what results each activity has produced for your business.

Benefits of Tracking Actual Activity Produced From A Campaign

When you’re trying to get people to visit your website either through a direct mail campaign or some other promotion, you’re going to get a lot of benefits if you take the time to track the actual activity produced from that campaign.

For example, if you’re running a newspaper ad, you can know exactly how many website visitors come to your website from that particular ad compared to another magazine ad that you may be running. In addition,

• You can track exactly what each of those visitors does on your website, such as
• How long they spend on the site,
• What pages they visit and also
• How many purchases are generated from a particular campaign.

So, you may be able to find out that the newspaper ad that you’re running in the local business journal performs much better than a magazine ad that you’re running in the national publication.

Know The Exact Cost Of A Website Visit From Different Campaigns

So, you can know exactly how many visits are arriving and also what those people are actually doing on your website. But one of the more powerful things that you can do to really help compare different campaigns is you can know exactly how much an actual visit costs you from each different campaign. So for example,

• If you are paying a $100 for a magazine ad that produces 10 visits,
• Then each of those visits is actually costing you $10, and so
• You’re able to break down the cost based on $10 per visit how many of those actually produce sales.

Using all of this data, you’re able to really calculate;

• Exactly how much revenue was produced by a campaign and
• Whether that campaign was profitable.

So, to take a step back, there are a lot of benefits that you can get by tracking campaigns very carefully.

• You’re going to know how many visits are coming in from a specific campaign.
• You’re going to know what those visits do on your website, and lastly,
• You’re going to be able to know exactly what the profitability is of each campaign that you’re running.

Use Google Analytics to Track Activity of Website Visitors

Google Analytics is a free website tracking software provided by Google that enables you to track the activity that goes on your website. We have a lot of other content on the website and resources you can use to learn more about Google Analytics. So, if you’re not using Google Analytics be sure to check those resources or reach out to us.

• With Google Analytics one of the things that you can do is use something called a tagged URL,
• Basically what this means is when you create a campaign such as a magazine ad, for example, rather than sending people directly to your home page, you can send people to a tagged version of that home page,
• Basically what that will do is people will still see the home page and they’ll still arrive exactly at the page that you wanted them to arrive at, but
• Google Analytics will look at the tags in that address and will track that that person came from the magazine ad rather than just some other website channel that you’re promoting.

So, one of the things you want to be sure to use is what’s called a tagged URL with Google Analytics.

How We Use Tagged URLs in Google Analytics to Track Website Visitors

In the show notes you will find the resource of how you can actually create one of those tagged URLs but feel free to reach out to us as well if you’re wanting additional guidance on how to use Google Analytics and how to actually create this tagged URL. But basically what you want to do is create the tagged URL and then use that URL in your campaign.

Usually what we do is we create a tagged URL, but then we also make what we call a clean URL. An example of that would be,

• If you’re sending people to your home page, your website address might be, you know, website.com.
• The tagged URL is going to be website.com/ a lot of different information.
• There is going to be a lot of different tags in there that Google Analytics is going to use.
• So, it’s a pretty complicated looking address.

What we do is;

• We create the tagged URL that has all the complicated information but then,
• We also create a very simple URL that redirects to the tagged URL
• For example, you might send people to website.com/newspaper or website.com/sdbj, San Diego Business Journal for example, and
• If somebody visits that address it’s going to take them to the home page but it’s going to be the tagged URL.

It’s a little bit complicated to explain but hopefully what we wanted to get across today is that you can track exactly how many visits are coming from each of your campaigns using this feature called a Google Analytics tagged URL.

Summary And Next Action

As a next action out of today:

• We recommend trying to change one or two of your current campaigns that you’re running to use tracked URLs.
• Create a tracked URL and use that in one or two of your existing campaigns to see the results in Google Analytics

If you want an overview of how to use Google Analytics or how to apply this in your business, feel free to contact us at competeonweb.com for a short consultation of how you can use this in your business.