Google’s Consumer Barometer says 32% of global buyers research online and offline before marking a purchase. An analysis of independent surveys found that 40% of online shoppers are influenced by offline marketing campaigns when making a purchase.

But how do you track these offline campaigns? How can you know whether they are working? There are actually several techniques for measuring offline campaigns, thanks in part — ironically — to today’s technology.

Types of Offline Campaigns

Before we discuss the types of tracking techniques at your disposal, let’s review some of the types of campaigns that can be run offline. There may be a platform you haven’t considered yet that can have exceptional potential for added revenue and growth for your business.

• Billboards: Consider this: The average American spends nine days out of their year stuck in traffic. Just think of the vast number of people sitting there hoping for a distraction in their mundane, daily commute. Entertain their wandering eyes by letting them gaze upon your well-crafted advertisement.
• Bus stops and train stations: There are over 4.2 billion individual bus trips within the United States every year. With millions of Americans riding their local bus and train lines each day, ads in these transportation stations are a great way to target those daily commuters.
  
• Vehicle wraps: In addition to ads at public transportation stations, you can place ads on or inside the transportation vehicle itself.
• Postcards: Wait … as in direct, physical mailing? Yes. Physical mail does not have a spam folder; what you send gets put straight into the recipient’s mailbox, P.O. box or mail slot. You might be surprised with the outcome, and it can cost you less than $1 per postcard.
• Magazine or newspaper ads: Print is not dead. Reach your audience through niche magazines related to your business to attract them to your site.
• Free Promotional items: Adding promotional items to your marketing efforts, such as distributing free items with your brand’s logo, can increase your brand image and recognition while supplementing your online campaigns and increasing business.
• Sponsorships: Sponsorships are a great way to advertise your brand offline while proving your commitment to your community. Sponsorships come in many forms, such as supporting a charity BBQ, creating a scholarship, or backing a local soccer team. In addition to increasing brand recognition, the positive publicity that comes with local sponsorships encourages potential customers to choose your business over competitors next time they need your service.
  

Ways to Track Offline Campaigns

No matter which format you use for your offline campaign, there are numerous ways you can encourage your audience to visit your online site. You can track exactly which offline medium your leads are coming from to understand which are most effective.

Custom landing pages/custom domain

Sending offline traffic to a custom landing page or custom domain is one of the best and most used methods for tracking offline campaigns. When a lead or customer visits your unique page, you’ll know exactly where they came from because the only way they could have known about the URL is via that specific ad.

For example, if you own a sporting goods store in your local community, you can run an ad during the football season in the newspaper directing people to a unique landing page (such as yourbusiness.com/gohawksfootball.com) that highlights the football gear you have in stock. Because you’re only providing this unique URL via this ad, you’ll know that your page views and purchases from that page came directly from that ad.

It’s important to use a “noindex meta tag” on these custom landing pages so that they’re not visible to search engines. This will not only avoid getting visitors to your page from sources other than your ad, but it will also keep you from being penalized SEO-wise for having duplicate content. To use a noindex meta tag, add < meta name=“robots” content=”noindex” > to the HEAD section of the pages you are going to create for these campaigns.

UTMs

Urchin Tracking Modules, or UTMs, are words or phrases appended to a URL that allow you to see where your page’s traffic comes from. UTMs are divided into six sections that are used to differentiate one from another. In each section, you put a word or phrase that you understand and can recognize later on that will help you identify where a lead came from:

1. Website URL: The destination URL you wish to track
2. Source: The type of campaign you are running such as Google, Facebook, newsletter, or magazine
3. Medium: Type of campaign such as CPC, CPA, banner, email
4. Name: Product name, promo code name
5. Term: Paid keywords or other distinguishing factors of the ad or ad group
6. Content: Image, content or other distinguishing factors to differentiate one ad from another

Let’s say you run a clothing company and want to launch campaigns using Facebook, Google, email newsletters, magazines and billboards promoting your spring releases. When you make a sale, you’ll want to know where it came from. This is where the detailed information in your UTM comes into play.

Example:

https://yourwebsite.com/
?utm_source=Magazine&utm_medium=CPA&utm_campaign=SpringRelease
&utm_term=Swimwear&utm_content=RedBottom

Leads who found your campaign in a magazine would see a URL with specific UTM variables at the end, as in the example above. When they type in the URL to search your site, your UTM will tell you exactly which campaign they were looking at.

To make your tracked URL more user-friendly and prevent your audience from having to type it all out, websites such as Bitly can help you generate a shortened URL that still includes all of the tracking variables — they’re just hidden.

Redirect domains

Similar to a custom landing page, a redirect domain provides a unique web address for each ad or audience. When visitors go to the unique web address, they’re redirected to the part of your main website that’s relevant to them.

For example, if you own a fitness center with multiple locations and you have promotion reps driving around your region with car magnet advertisements, you can include domains like SanFranFitness.com, SantaCruzFitness.com or MontereyFitness.com on the magnets for each respective town. When someone visits one of those unique sites, they’ll be redirected to the specific part of your main website related to that location. This allows you to see how many visitors came in through each redirect domain so you can measure the effectiveness of your outreach in each area. Just be sure to make the domain you’re promoting easy to remember and type.

Unique discount codes

By including a unique discount code on a piece of direct mail or a print ad, then measuring how many people used that code, you’ll know exactly how many people saw that particular piece of mail or ad and used the discount code as a result. You can even use unique discount codes per individual: Have you ever gotten a piece of direct mail with an odd code such as “JAGJH4”? That business is providing a unique code to each person receiving that direct mail so it can measure specifically who is responding to their outreach.

To use discount codes, you will need a marketing automation platform that supports and tracks these codes. These platforms will automatically generate the unique codes, tie them to your contact information in your CRM, and track the use of your codes.

The post How to Easily Track Your Offline Campaigns appeared first on The Ontraport Blog.

The results of your campaigns may surprise you, but once you can see what’s truly working and captivating your audience, you can start making marketing decisions you know will pay off. You have to have cold, hard data to back you up, though, and having a tracking system in place is the key to collecting such critical data. 

We reached out to marketing tracking experts and several businesses to find out what surprised them the most after they analyzed their marketing data. Here’s what they found and how they used marketing tracking to improve the effectiveness of their campaigns. 

Which advertising keywords and copy are performing?

Selecting appropriate keywords can make all the difference for your marketing campaigns. Marketing analytics reveal which keywords and ads are attracting the most leads and converting the most sales, allowing you to focus your efforts towards your most profitable ads. 

Mobile Pocket Office CEO Josh Ovett recalls his experience with keyword tracking: “My business partner and I recently acquired an interest in a 14-year-old residential moving company. While it was consistent in sales, we saw room for improvement. The business was spending over $100,000 per year on AdWords and we had no information on which AdWords, copy and lead sources were causing individual sales. We had no problem getting leads, we just needed to know exactly which leads were converting to sales so we could start confidently spending on keywords and ads that converted to sales.

Using Ontraport, we kept a record of which leads and sales came from which keywords and ads. We then exported that information back into AdWords to optimize our campaigns for both offline and online sales conversions.

Without implementing this, we wouldn’t know which keywords to confidently bid up and at what time of day, and we wouldn’t know how to adjust campaigns for maximum profit margins. So far, tracking has allowed us to double our leads and lower our costs by about 30%.”

Using a marketing tracking system for your ads and keywords is essential to understanding how your campaigns are qualifying leads and converting customers. 

Which marketing strategies are actually converting leads?

Marketing analytics also allow you to better understand the customer acquisition process. For example, with UTM links you can see exactly where your leads are coming from. This allows you to refocus your time and money on only your most effective strategies. By using marketing analytics to weed out what works and what doesn’t, you can increase your overall efficiency and better allocate your resources. 

Aaron Norris, Vice President of the Norris Group, says, “One year, we gave up 24 weekends to do speaking engagements all over the state of California. At the end of that year, I pulled data from our CRM to see where leads were tracking from. Indeed, they were coming from our speaking engagements.

However, I also pulled conversion data. Where were leads coming from that actually converted? Well, long story short, we stopped working most weekends the following year with no drop in sales. Come to find out, referrals and the internet were driving the majority of our most valuable leads. Speaking engagements drove leads; they just did not convert.

I dropped what didn’t work and started focusing more on what did. Now, we bifurcated traffic so we’re diving deeper into SEO vs SEM leads. It’s access to the data that makes all the difference. And, I got my weekends back.”

How significant are color choices?

While color choice may seem trivial when it comes to marketing, you may be surprised by just how much it can affect consumer behavior on your pages. In fact, color choice could be a reason you aren’t converting more leads into customers. According to Vlogger Gear director, Thomas Lewis, “After conducting A/B testing on our website, we noticed that color scheme plays a huge role in website and business performance. We noticed that certain colors and even placement of call-to-action buttons increased our click-through rate by 80%.

We went a step further and used certain colors that appeal to our target audience which we researched in my scientific studies. By targeting our audience with specific colors, our CTR increased another 30%. It’s a truly powerful and easy-to-use tool.”

Because it’s proven that color choice can carry a psychological effect on your site visitors’ emotions and decision-making, it might be best to split test your color choices to see what works best for your business. 

What devices are users viewing content on?

With so many people looking at content on the go, it may be time to segment a new promising audience — your mobile device users. According to Digital Marketing Specialist for Archway Cards Ltd., Jason Scott, “For some time now, we’ve been told that this is the ‘mobile era’ — the era where people use their mobile phones for internet usage over the more traditional PCs, laptops and tablets. It wasn’t until I started paying attention to our visitor device usage that I realized just how true this was:

75% of our visitors are on mobile phones. Rewind just two years and that percentage was less than 50. That’s a staggering increase in mobile internet usage, and it’s only going to increase further in the coming months and years.”

Who really is the target demographic? 

By digging into your marketing data, you may determine that the audience you’ve been targeting in your ads is not actually your strongest customer base. While this finding may be unsettling at first, it’s actually a good thing because it allows you to follow the data to uncover who the real demographic is for your brand. 

Fuze SEO Founder and CEO Jon Clark explains, “I work with a sports apparel company (think Under Armour, 2XU, etc.). We were contracted to help them expand their marketing efforts. During our discovery meeting, we talked about persona targets, typical consumers of the product, etc. Through this conversation, we aligned on some general starting points like athletes, ages 18-35, male, etc., and then we launched our paid efforts. It didn’t take long to see these assumptions were off-base. Our Facebook remarketing demographics showed a higher percentage of sales coming from much older users — ages 45-65 — and the demos included a 60%-40% split female to male. Additionally, our Google display campaigns showed similar demographic profiles.

We immediately began working on a customer survey and quickly learned that many of the products were being purchased for surgical rehab for this older demographic: knee replacements, hip replacements, etc. What we learned? By following the data, we found a completely new product target and, even more importantly, confirmed that sometimes a client can be too close to their product. Always test and allow the data to inform future strategies.”

Which marketing channels work?

Deciding which marketing channels work best for your business is all about testing and analyzing. Ignitive Managing Director Aaron Lin says, “For a number of months, our marketing efforts were spread thinly across a number of platforms: LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Google AdWords, Bing; you name it, we’ve tried it. It was only when we started tracking that we were able to identify what was working and what wasn’t.

We kept our strategy as simple as possible: Make an offer, send traffic to a landing page, and capture the visitor’s information. Being in a B2B industry, you’d imagine that LinkedIn and Twitter would be excellent platforms for generating B2B leads; but the results that we were shown were quite the opposite.

We found that visitors to our website from search-related channels were about 80% more likely to convert; this includes visitors from both Bing and Google. But oddly enough, the landing page’s design and copy had little effect on conversions. Increasing the number of fields on the lead capture form did not show a decrease in sign-ups either.

The number one thing that we learned from this experience is that the selection of our marketing channel was arguably the most vital; now everything else comes secondary.”

With marketing analytics, Ignitive was able to save both time and energy by quickly identifying which platforms weren’t working and adjusted accordingly. 

How valuable is word of mouth?

Marketing analytics show which sources your traffic is coming from so that you can better understand how you’re generating leads and how to best target them. In some instances, referrals can drive even more traffic than advertisements, which will allow you to spend those would-be advertising dollars elsewhere.

This was the case for Aptus Creative Marketing CEO Gillian Perkins, who says, “When I started tracking my marketing and traffic sources to my blog, I was surprised to discover that most of my traffic (and eventual customers) came from referrals from other blogs — not from big search engines.” This showed Perkins the importance of exposure within her industry and that she didn’t need to spend as much for advertising on Google or Facebook ads, since these were not driving customers to her site.

Regardless of all the variables, there’s one central theme among them all: What might be working for one business might not be working for the other, even if they’re in the same industry.

Dig into your marketing data and see what you find. It might surprise you, and the results of your findings may pay off in the long run.

The post Marketers Tell All: How Their Best Guesses Misled Them appeared first on The Ontraport Blog.

The scope of what’s possible with marketing tracking is ever-growing — there are constantly new tools coming out that allow you to gain insight into a new area of customer behavior that you didn’t have access to before. One of the easiest ways to track at every stage of the customer lifecycle is through use of UTMs. But, as with any large project, starting by completing one small step at a time is key to getting the momentum going and eventually getting it done.

We recommend looking at your marketing analytics in terms of the customer lifecycle. When you break up your marketing data into five separate stages — Attract, Convert, Fulfill, Delight and Refer — you’ll have a framework to better manage the data and use it to nurture leads and customers from one stage to the next.

Below, you’ll learn about how the strength of your relationships with each lead and customer should influence the types of data you pull and where you pull it from.

Stage 1: Attract

During the Attract stage, you’re working to initiate some form of relationship by making prospects aware of your brand. This stage is all about making that first impression by introducing yourself and working to earn your new leads’ contact information so you can keep in touch.

At this point, your audiences are cold — meaning these people are nameless (not in your CRM database), and you’re trying to do two things:

1. “Cookie” them so that even if they don’t opt in for anything or give you their contact information, you can at least retarget them.
2. Get them to fill out a form with their contact information so that you can begin reaching them via email or phone call.

To attract new leads to your brand, running Facebook and Instagram ads using interest- and demographic-based targeted audiences can help match with your brand’s ideal customers.

Stats to track in the Attract stage

Because ads are such an integral part of this stage, many of the data points you’ll review will relate to the interactions people have with your ads. To gauge the success of your ads, you can see if people are clicking on them and how long they stay on the page once they do. If people are rarely clicking, and the ones who do are expensive and close the page right away, it might be time to make tweaks to your audience, copy or design.

After months of running your Attract campaigns, use your tracked UTM data to look back at how many of your existing customers first came in contact with your brand through each awareness ad. To keep track of it all, here are the stats you’ll want to look at:

• Click-through rate (CTR)
• Cost per click (CPC)
• Average time on page
• ROI and first-click attribution

Stage 2: Convert

The Convert stage of the customer lifecycle is all about turning your warm-to-hot leads into customers. Now that these leads are on your list, you know exactly who they are and where they came from because of UTMs. You’ve already begun to build a relationship with them, so your goal now is to get them to purchase from you, which you can encourage in a few different ways:

1. Email offer funnels (with links tracked by UTMs)
2. Retargeting ads that use the cookies you placed on leads’ browsers in the Attract stage to offer your product to them on Facebook or Google

Stats to track in the Convert stage

When you’re tracking your conversion success with UTMs, it’s important to first establish your end goal. A conversion doesn’t have to mean a paid purchase — it can be a sign-up for a demo, an entry-level product sale, or even an opt-in for a free trial — but whatever it means to you, base your metrics tracking on that.

The main way you’ll keep track of campaign conversions is by looking at your UTMs in Google Analytics. Here’s what you will look for:

• Conversions or sign-ups
• Number of opportunities
• Conversion rate
• Number of conversions
• Impressions or views
• Click-through rate (CTR)
• Cost per acquisition (CPA)
• ROI

Stage 3: Fulfill

Now that your leads are customers, it’s time to deliver on your promises and wow them. This is where you add more value, ensure your customers’ success with your product, and instill confidence in their choice to buy from you.

Delivering an incredible customer experience is critical for retention, so the more value you pack into their experience at this stage, the better.

Stats to track in the Fulfill stage

The value you create for your customers means nothing if they’re unaware of it. In this stage, your goal is to keep track of how well your customers are engaging with your products and services. If you deliver an online product or service, have they set it up? If you provide complimentary setup calls or visits, how many customers are taking advantage of them, and how much time passes by before they schedule the setup?

Here are some of the stats to look for when measuring whether your customers are maximizing their experience:

• Usage
• Email unsubscribes
• Customer satisfaction
• Customer lifetime value (CLV)
• Open rate on delivery and bonus emails
• Click-through rate for bonus content
• Conversion rate for onboarding calls or tutorial video views
• Conversion time
• Bounce/spam rate

Stage 4: Delight

Once the initial excitement wears off with your brand, the Delight stage is where you go the extra mile to maintain the positive relationship. Here, you’re working to strengthen your customer bonds into long-term relationships and prime them to refer more business to you. It’s an opportunity to share upsell and cross-sell offers with existing customers and to remind them why they picked your brand in the first place.

According to Astute Solutions, “Attracting a new customer is six to seven times more expensive than keeping an existing one,” so if a customer has made it all the way to the Delight stage, it’s incredibly valuable for your business to keep them coming back. By looking back at your source UTMs you can custom tailor content for all of your customers in the delight phase?

Stats to track in the Delight stage

Determining your success in the Delight stage is all about tracking conversions on upsells, cross-sells and higher-end products. If you offer a tiered online product, are you keeping track of which customers are upgrading? For both online and physical products and services, have they recently purchased more items from you?

Additional ways to gain insight into the strength of your relationships with customers is how often they buy from you. Are they once-a-year buyers or weekly? Depending on your industry, the expected purchasing frequency will vary. Here are some of the stats you can use to keep track of how delighted your existing customers are with your brand:

• Upsell and cross-sell conversions
• Repeat customer rate
• Purchasing frequency

Stage 5: Refer

If you’ve played your cards right in each stage of the lifecycle, you’ll reap your ultimate reward in the Refer stage. The greatest value you receive from your customers comes not from their initial purchase or even their upsell purchase, but from the new customers they refer to you.

Referrals are especially important for growing your brand because your existing customers are likely already recommending your products and services to right-match prospects. According to InMoment, “75 percent of loyal customers will recommend a brand to friends and family.”

Stats to track in the Refer stage

Effectively keeping track of your referrals is a win-win for both you and the customers. When you know what to track, you not only learn more about what types of customers grow to eventually become strong referrers, but your referrers also get the proper credit and payment for their work. Here are some of the stats to track in the Refer stage:

• First-click attribution on affiliate links
• Number of purchases from referrals
• Participation rate
• Affiliate link impressions
  
• Marketing UTMs

The post Stats to Track Through the Customer Lifecycle appeared first on The Ontraport Blog.

Perhaps you’ve gotten by making educated guesses about how to improve your marketing. Although basing your decision-making on instincts and general knowledge of your target market can float you for a while, it is still merely guesswork. While much of marketing is about constantly trying new things to see what works, there has to be a healthy balance of data-backed decision making so that you can avoid simply spinning your wheels (and wasting your marketing dollars).

If you’ve done some experimenting and testing in your marketing efforts already, you have probably come to the realization that you need to narrow down your strategy by focusing on which marketing assets perform best and which need improvement. Utilizing your data may be your answer. By taking control over your marketing using data to guide your decisions, you can confidently make changes to assets that are not converting and generate improved results.

A case for data-based decision making

Although you may have a strong idea of what your audience responds well to, no one can predict with 100% accuracy which messages your audience will respond to. Because there are no set rules for online marketing success, entrepreneurs have to learn from a lot of trial and error along the way — which is why testing the performance of your marketing efforts is crucial. Regular testing saves time in the long-run and helps entrepreneurs avoid dealing with endless rounds of trial and error. The value of testing lies in the ability to take control over your content and improve accordingly based on data-backed test results. 

Interestingly, half of small businesses still aren’t focusing on optimization and it’s affecting their overall growth. Many small business owners assume that effective testing is expensive, complicated and, therefore, reserved for the big guys. However, studies show an exponential rise in overall success rates when testing on landing pages, paid digital media and email marketing is used. Testing is one of the most powerful and fundamental ways to improve metric results for your business. 

Why modern marketers turn to split testing

Split testing is an easy and inexpensive way to gain the information you need to improve your response rates across a variety of marketing mediums. Entrepreneurs can quickly determine what their market prefers, allowing them to steadily improve their messaging and conversion rates. According to the Data-Driven Split Testing guide, “You should be testing everything all the time, because every minute you spend not testing something is a minute that you’re potentially taking a loss.” Split testing is a powerful way to improve your content engagement by gaining control over your results.

The more split tests you run, the more you’ll learn about your audience’s behaviors and preferences — allowing you to quickly make informed decisions about where to focus your time and money. According to marketing expert Dale Cudmore, “Split tests are a statistically backed method that tells you if a particular change, usually on your website, will lead to more profit. Even small improvements in your conversion rate can lead to tens of thousands in extra profit every year for the foreseeable future.”

There are countless split testing case studies that show the big difference in conversions that simple changes can make. For example, FSAstock.com, an ecommerce store that stocks Americans with FSA-eligible products and services, improved their revenue per visit when utilizing the testing function. They ran A/B split tests to eventually find that their tab-heavy navigation bar was too distracting for customers. After simplifying it, they saw a 53.8% increase in revenue on their page.

In another revealing example, a business named Extra Space Storage, a storage facility with over 1,000 facilities across the US, was looking to improve their conversion rate. They decided to test the color of their CTA button. Originally blue, the split test tried yellow and orange, too. In the end, the orange button outperformed the others with a conversion rate increase of 7.8%. 

You too can gather insight and adjust you marketing efforts to increase conversion using this guide.

How will split testing benefit your business?

By running split tests, you will get:

• An easy way to find the best version of any online ad so you can spend your marketing dollars wisely and efficiently 
• Actionable information about which CTAs perform best so you can make simple tweaks that will dramatically improve your sales
• Clear answers about which email subject lines work best so  can choose the ones that your customers won’t be able to resist
• Insight into the performance of your copy so you can continuously improve it to attract more customers from your target market
• Solid data about which landing page layouts your customers prefer so you can increase form fills and get more leads than ever before
• A better understanding of the different ways to split test so that you can identify which is best for achieving your goal

For an easy-to-follow guide that will show you how to run simple yet effective split tests from start to finish, check out Data-Driven Split Testing.

The post Achieve Better Marketing Results by Analyzing and Optimizing With Split Testing appeared first on The Ontraport Blog.

Taking the time to explore what really works for your audience and potential customers is crucial. If you aren’t using any strategies toward this end, much of what you do is guesswork — and that is not a long term marketing solution. Even if you have had some success with your campaigns in the past, you may be experiencing a slump in performance and need to revamp your marketing strategy. Without knowing which of your ads and assets are bringing in the most traffic and conversions, there’s no way to effectively decipher what’s working best.  

Marketers today have many tools available to help refine their efforts. If you’ve looked into some of these solutions, you have probably heard about the use of marketing analytics and its ability to help marketers capture information about campaign performance. Marketing analytics can help you figure out which campaigns and marketing assets are performing and which are underperforming so that you can make effective decisions and adjustments with confidence. 

Start in the shallow end

Interestingly, for all of the emphasis experts place on website analytics in the marketing world, fewer than 30% of small businesses have actually implemented this tool into their strategies, according to Blue Corona. The reason for this is often that business owners and marketers feel overwhelmed by either the amount of data or how to best interpret it.

Going after every aspect of marketing analytics at once can be overwhelming and confusing. So, to get started, focus your energy on understanding where your web traffic is coming from and which of your marketing efforts are performing best. Once you know which of your lead sources are performing well, you can use that feedback to iterate from there. For example, you can put more of your advertising budget toward the ads that are successful, or send the email in your funnel that gets the most click-throughs and stop sending other emails.

To accomplish this, you simply need to implement UTM variables, which allow you to assess where your web traffic is coming from. UTM variables are alterations to the URL of the page you’re sending traffic to, which enable you to identify them specifically.

Steer clear of low-converting channels

In a typical marketing campaign, your business is going to utilize multiple channels in attempts to generate as much traffic as possible to your desired website or landing page. If you are sending all your traffic to the same website, how are you going to know which source they are coming from and which ones are performing the best?

According to the UTM Link Planning Worksheet, “It’s important to use a link with UTM tracking so that you can measure the results of your time and money spent promoting your business via different channels.” As a result, you won’t have to wonder what’s working in your marketing strategy and what’s not. With UTM links in place, you’ll have all the data at your fingertips to confidently make decisions about your marketing plans and budget.

Adding a UTM link is just the beginning of your lead-converting adventure

Tracking your marketing campaigns by implementing UTM variables will allow you to:

• Know exactly where your leads and web traffic are coming from so that you can have a more complete picture of your customer journey
• See which channels are generating the most leads so that you can put more effort and budget into the sources that are sending you the most prospects
• Understand which of your digital advertisements are converting the best in order to optimize your ad sets to only include your best performers
• Know which content piece or blog article is driving the most traffic to your website so that you can promote your most popular content
• Integrate with a marketing analytics platform that will automatically store and sort the information you gather from your UTM variables for future use
• Know when it’s the right time to “turn off” underperforming lead sources so you can get the most out of your marketing budget and boost your ROI

For in-depth information on what UTM variables are and exactly how to generate and implement them into your business, check out the UTM Link Planning Worksheet.

The post Stop Guessing Which of Your Lead Sources Are Working appeared first on The Ontraport Blog.

Frustrated with your marketing performance numbers?

You’re excited to share your product and knowledge with the world, yet it seems like nothing you try has been effective in getting your business in front of the right audience to generate the traction you are looking for. You’re launching ads, sending emails and posting landing pages blindly, without knowing if your audience is going to respond or engage. Even the marketing campaigns you spend lots of time perfecting don’t get the results you’re hoping for — which means money, time and opportunity wasted. It’s tough to build a successful business when you’re just guessing who your audience might be and what messaging will best speak to them.

Other small business owners and entrepreneurs have been where you are now. Many entrepreneurs assume that it’s extremely expensive and complicated to acquire the kind of tools needed in order to understand which marketing elements work best and that they’re only accessible to massive businesses that have the budgets to match. You may have wondered, even if they were affordable, how a small business could find the time to implement and maintain them? This uncertainty has left many marketers unsure about the best way to speak with their audiences, leaving budgets to be squandered on creating ineffective messaging. 

The secret to sustainably improving your marketing

There’s a relatively simple way to see how your audience responds to your marketing in real time and to discover what’s bringing you the best return on your money. It is not some elusive and expensive tool that is exclusive to large companies. It is a simple technique that anyone can employ and which can deliver big ROI for very little to no extra investment. It’s called split testing.

When you use split testing in your marketing strategy, you are simply experimenting with variations in your landing pages, emails, ads, or other types of marketing collateral and then analyzing the results to better understand which aspects resonate most with the specific audience you’re targeting. In fact, former President of the United States Barack Obama used it in his campaigns to raise an additional $60 million. It’s how he figured out which messages in his campaign spoke most strongly to his audience and those most likely to support him. 71% of small and mid-sized businesses report testing their marketing efforts two or more times a week, with 60% of businesses saying it’s a great way to optimize their conversion rates.

Although it may still sound difficult and pricey, 63% of the businesses reported having no trouble implementing these testing methods. If you’re already using a modern all-in-one marketing automation platform, implementing this tool won’t cost you any more than you’re already spending. With little extra effort, split testing allows you to see which landing page converts more, which email gets the most opens or clicks, and which ads really are giving you the boost your business has been waiting for. While there is a small time and financial investment involved in initiating split testing if you aren’t already using an all-in-one marketing tool, the cost of skipping the process, and thus missing out on increased conversions, is considerably greater over time.

How can split testing pay off in your business? The data speaks for itself

In just one example of simple split testing, ExpressWatches used the strategy to help increase sales 107% by replacing their price guarantee badge with a trust symbol. As Peep Laja, the founder of ConversionXL wrote,

With nearly three quarters of companies using split testing multiple times a week, split testing has become necessary for businesses in order to stay competitive. As the What to Split Test guide states, “If you could improve a landing page’s conversion rate from 1% to just 2%, that would mean doubling your results — opt-ins and sales — on just one page. That’s a huge opportunity for your business and just one of many attainable goals by means of split testing. You never know what will end up resonating with your target audience — so always be testing!” And with so many opportunities for small successes that add up to big wins for your business, the sooner you can get started with split testing, the better.

The benefits of split testing your marketing

Split testing can make a significant difference in the effectiveness of your campaigns moving forward. With it, you’ll be able to:

• Test every variation you’ve ever wanted to try in your marketing campaign so you can be confident which variation works
• Reduce the amount of time used to optimize your conversions to make more revenue, faster
• Make the most effective decisions in terms of your marketing budget to improve your marketing performance across the board
• Rather than guessing, know right away which of your landing pages, emails or ads are performing so you can eliminate those that are losing you money
• See data-driven results from your campaigns so you can create a stable, sustainable revenue stream moving forward

Need more inspiration on what you can (and should) split test? Check out What to Split Test for ideas and guidance on different elements you should consider when you start split testing your marketing assets.

The post What Speaks Best to Leads? This Marketing Technique Can Tell You appeared first on The Ontraport Blog.

Tracking your marketing often starts with your landing pages, which are a hub for your customer interactions. You get a window into the actions your visitors take on the page via the tracking scripts that you add behind the scenes.

Tracking scripts allow you to see what’s holding your page visitors’ attention, how long they’re staying on your page, and how they interact with your content. This kind of information allows you to make improvements to your page design, content, call to action or even your product pricing and offer so that you can increase your chances of getting sales or opt-ins on your page.

Tracking scripts also allow your advertising or tracking platform to identify visitors to your site so that you can retarget them later with ads on Facebook. Without them, you would simply lose those visitors with no way of bringing them back.

You add tracking scripts, which are pieces of code, to the source code of your landing pages in your page building platform. There are dozens of different types of tracking scripts available, each allowing you to understand a different type of interaction with your pages. To help you get a sense of how you can integrate tracking scripts into your next campaign, we’ve compiled a list of the five tracking scripts that we never publish a page without.

Google Analytics

One of the most popular and powerful tracking tools out there, Google Analytics can display in-depth analytics and stats about your website’s traffic. You can see how many total visits your site earned, how many unique visitors, the average session length, bounce rate and much more. Google Analytics seamlessly integrates with Google’s AdWords platform for measuring the ROI of your paid search advertisements.

You can create a free account and place your own tracking code on your website to start gathering this data. Check out Google’s step-by-step instructions on how to generate your own Google Analytics tracking code snippet.

Facebook tracking pixel

If you advertise on Facebook, adding their tracking pixel to your pages is a must. Facebook’s Pixel tracks visitors to your site and ties their data to any known Facebook accounts. This makes it possible to retarget those who visit your website, reducing your ad costs and increasing your conversions.

Even if you are not yet running Facebook ads, if you think you might do so in the future, you should add this tracking pixel to your site so that it can start collecting visitor data for you to use in future advertising campaigns.

You can also install event codes on your pages, which are, according to Facebook, “actions that happen on your website, either as a result of ads (paid) or not (organic).” Facebook has nine standard events that it tracks and then optimizes your ads for conversions.

View Facebook’s step-by-step instructions on how to generate your own Facebook Pixel.

Crazy Egg

Crazy Egg is a heat-mapping tool that allows you to see exactly where your web visitors are clicking or not clicking on your page. The tool generates screenshots of your web pages and then tracks how your visitors interact with your site. It tracks where they are clicking, how far they travel down the page, at what point they stop scrolling, and more.

Crazy Egg is a great tool for tracking which elements of your pages are working and if any changes you made are effective. View Crazy Egg’s in-depth instructions on how to generate its script.

Google Remarketing Tag

The Google Remarketing Tag is the most straightforward tracking script on this list. It allows you to retarget those who have visited your site with advertisements. It adds your web visitors to a remarketing list, and you can show ads to those on that list.

Here are detailed instructions on how to generate your Google Remarketing

code.

Google Tag Manager

Unlike other tracking scripts, Google Tag Manager stands out from the rest by allowing easy installation of just one script to your pages. It serves as a simple tool used for tag management. If you have a lot of tags to keep track of, Google Tag Manager allows you to manage all other scripts in one area without having to manually edit every single page. Instead, you get to deploy your tags with one simple installation — for free. Although Google Tag Manager serves a different purpose from Google Analytics, they actually go hand-in-hand. In fact, Google Tag Manager allows you to customize the data that gets sent to Google Analytics. Check out how to manage all your website tags without editing code here.

How to add tracking scripts to your page

Now, you might be wondering where or how to add tracking scripts to your page. With a landing page creator on a platform like Ontraport, it is simple and straightforward. While you’re building your landing pages, all you have to do is grab the code from any tracking tool you’re using (Facebook, Google, Wicked Reports, etc.) and paste it into either the custom header or footer code section. To ensure less loading time for visitors, we suggest inserting scripts into the footer. When inserting the tracking script into the header, you run the risk of visitors staring at a blank white screen for longer since headers prevent page images from loading first.

While you can add scripts to your page at any time, we recommend you do it before publishing the page to maximize your tracking efforts.

Another useful strategy to help you organize the tracking scripts that you add to your pages is to label them within the code itself. This may sound confusing, but it is very simple. Before each individual snippet of code, you can insert a label that will tell you what tracking tool it is referencing. For example, enclosing the label “Google Analytics Code” with <!– –> brackets essentially tells the browser not to read that portion of the code. The final label looks like: <!– Google Analytics Code –>

This allows you to see which tracking script does what when you have multiple scripts on one page.

Remember, you don’t have to use all five of these tracking scripts at once. You should pick and choose based on the platforms you advertise on and your business’s marketing needs. Let us know what tracking scripts you are using in the comments below.

The post The 5 Tracking Scripts We Never Publish a Page Without appeared first on The Ontraport Blog.

But you notice that your campaign isn’t bringing in the sales numbers you’d hoped for. So you take a few stabs in the dark, spending more on certain digital ads, adjusting the copy of your sales emails, or even changing the offer in hopes that your results will turn around. 

This scenario is less than ideal, yet way too many businesses find themselves in a similar situation.

As a preemptive strike against running into roadblocks in your marketing campaigns, try implementing UTM variables. UTM variables tell you where your customers are coming to your landing pages from — down to the specific ad, email, or other marketing asset you’re using to send traffic to the page.

UTM variables are simply labels, or tags, you add to the end of the URL of the page you’re linking to. These tags will later allow you to identify which marketing asset the contact clicked on.

Here’s how it works: In any marketing campaign, you likely promote your sales page across multiple platforms — possibly an ad you push into your prospects’ Facebook newsfeed, a banner ad on Google, or a hyperlink in an email. Across all of these platforms, you’ll include a link to your page and, while the link destination is the same, the UTM tags on the end of the link will vary.

When contacts visit your page and fill out a form, such as a form to opt in to your email newsletter, their information is entered into your CRM database along with the UTM variables stored in their browser from their visit. For example, if they came from a Facebook ad, the UTM link will display that the source was Facebook, and this will be stored in their contact record for your reference.

Breaking Down UTM Variables

UTM variables are organized into five categories: Campaign, Lead Source, Medium, Content and Term. You can use all five variables in one URL, or any combination.

Here is what a typical link using UTM variables will look like:

http://ontraport.com/?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=Post

&utm_campaign=Email%20Marketing%20Ebook

&utm_term=Nov_1&utm_content=Download_Now

This link will still direct anyone who clicks it to ontraport.com. It will also store the following information in their browser and, if they opt in, in their contact record:

Campaign: Email Marketing Ebook

Lead Source: Facebook

Medium: Post

Content: Download_Now

Term: Nov_1

How to Format Your UTM Variables

Campaign (Required): What is the campaign name? What campaign are you sending traffic to? What is the main offer you want people who click your links or ads to opt in for?

For example, if you’re tracking your holiday sale campaign, the “campaign” tag could be “holiday.”

Lead Source (Required):  What platform or website is this link placed on? Where are these leads coming from? Facebook, Google, email, blog, etc.?

For example, if you place a link on your Facebook ad, the “lead source” tag would be “facebook.”

Medium (Required): What kind of format is the link contained in? This is the medium on the platform that you used to link to. A social media post? A Facebook newsfeed ad? A blog article?

For example, the link from your Facebook ads could have the “medium” tag of “ad.”

Content (Optional): This variable should include identifying information about the specific content they clicked on. What version of an ad was it? What headline was it? What image did it have? What CTA did it have? This variable should be completely unique for each link.

For example, if you use the “Buy Now” CTA on an ad, the “content” tag for that ad would be “Buy Now.”

Term (Optional): This variable is generally used for search platforms and is where you would put the information about the terms you are bidding on. In Google, this can be the specific search term or keywords that a lead would use to find your Adwords campaign. You could also use it to identify the audience that you used for an ad on Facebook.

For example, if you want to bid on the term “ecommerce,” you would use the “term” tag “ecommerce.”

The important thing to remember is that once you’ve set up the UTM structure for a specific URL, it’s crucial that you use the variables you’ve established consistently. Keep the spelling, spacing and capitalization exactly the same each time you use a variable. Otherwise they will be tracked as two different variables. For example, facebook, Facebook, _Facebook and -Facebook would all be considered different variables, even though they are the same word.

Once you’ve decided on the best variable structure for your campaign, you can put those variables into a UTM link generator or use Ontraport’s tracking URL builder to create your UTM links.

Getting the Most Out of UTM Variables

Some marketing automation and tracking platforms, such as Ontraport, track your traffic at numerous times throughout their experience with your brand. It allows you to track:

• First-click attribution: the first link a person clicked on that led him or her to join your contact list, which tells you which specific lead sources are most successful in obtaining leads
• Last-click attribution: the last link a person clicked before they bought your product, which tells you which of your assets are most convincing in driving sales

With this information at hand, you can decide to put more of your advertising budget toward certain ads, or send more traffic to a certain landing page that’s proven to lead to more sales.

Analyzing Your UTM Results

Now that you’ve set up your UTM links, it’s time to find out what’s been going on behind the scenes. There are a few ways to look at all of your results — it just depends on which platform you’re familiar with or what you want to learn to use. The most popular one is Google Analytics, but if you’re using an automation platform, like Ontraport, all your stats will show up in-app.

Putting UTMs to Use

So, when exactly should you use UTM variables? Use them any time you’re sending traffic to your own pages. Whether it’s in a blog article, a social media post, or an ad, it’s important to use a link with UTM tracking so that you can measure the results of your time and money spent promoting your business via different channels.

UTM variables are extremely valuable when it comes to tracking the performance of your marketing campaigns and can give you insight into what type of content and sources resonate best with a certain audience. This type of insight can help you to optimize your current and future marketing campaigns and increase the reach of your budget.

The post How To Implement UTM Variables in Your Next Marketing Campaign appeared first on The Ontraport Blog.

The ability to monitor these results in real-time allows you to understand what’s working and what’s not — and even adjust your efforts mid-campaign to influence better results.

Marketing automation platforms like Ontraport make viewing this kind of information possible but, with so much data at your fingertips, it’s important to understand how to interpret it before you make a move.

Here, we’ll break down the six performance reports available in Ontraport with tips on how to apply your results to your campaigns. With this data available to you visually on your campaign map, you’re equipped to make faster, smarter decisions to improve your results.

Contact flow reports

One of the most basic reports for getting rapid insight into your campaign’s performance is the contact flow report, which essentially shows how contacts are making their way through your campaign map. Specifically, it shows you how many people are at each element on your map at any given time and how many people have been at each element since you launched.

How to use it

The contact flow report can help you spot areas where leads and contacts are getting stuck. If many contacts are stuck waiting to achieve the same goal, it’s a good indicator that you should either adjust your campaign to better motivate them to take action or change your goal.

You can also use the contact flow report to easily find segments of your contacts to specifically market to. For example, you can click on the contact flow statistic on any element to view a list of those stuck contacts. Then, you can send an email or perform any specific task with that group.

Funnel conversion reports

Just as you’d measure the conversion rate for an ad or a landing page, in Ontraport you can measure the conversion rate for each goal within your campaign. Everything leading to a goal on your map is effectively a funnel, so your conversion report tells you how well you’re moving contacts through your funnel to reach your goals.

How to use it

Look for goals that have unusually low or high conversion rates — what steps on the map leading up to those goals might be influencing the conversions?

Another thing to pay attention to is how poor conversion rates on early campaign goals might be negatively affecting later-stage goals. Say that you have a campaign with 100 people on it. Your campaign is telling people to sign up for your free online course then sending an offer for a discount on your main product to everyone who responded. Let’s say that only five people achieved your first goal, signing up for your course. That’s a 5% conversion rate — not so great. Then, let’s say that one person buys your main product. Out of your entire campaign audience of 100, that’s a 1% conversion rate. To fix it, you could work on improving your offer, but even if that offer converted at 100%, if only five people saw it, you’d still never get enough sales to justify your time and effort.

But the conversion rate for people who actually saw the offer for your main product is great — five people saw it and one converted, which means you had a 20% conversion rate. If that rate can stay the same as you increase the number of people who move to that step in the funnel, you’ll be able to sell far more. To fix this problem, focus on promoting your free online course offer to increase the number of people who respond. Then, you can convert more people later on in your funnel.

Lifetime value reports

Knowing the lifetime value of your leads — the total amount they contribute to your bottom line over time — is one of the most important metrics a marketer needs. Without this information, it’s impossible to know how much you can profitably spend to acquire a new customer.

In Ontraport, the lifetime value report shows the total and average amount spent by the contacts who hit any element. This includes money that they’ve spent on any product throughout their entire relationship with your brand since they entered your database. You can compare how lifetime value grows over time for each step on the map and understand which pieces of your campaign have the greatest overall impact on revenue. 

How to use it

Understanding the lifetime value of your campaigns can help you make better decisions about your marketing budget. For example, if you know that it typically costs $15 to acquire a new contact, you might wonder if you’re overpaying. It seems expensive, but what if you also knew that, on average, contacts on your campaign spend $30? With that piece of the puzzle, you know that investing $15 to acquire a new contact is a smart move that will earn you money.

You can also compare how the lifetime value changes for different segments of your audience. For example, you can filter your report by lead source to compare the lifetime value of leads from Facebook to leads from LinkedIn. Understanding lifetime value on a channel-by-channel basis is incredibly valuable when making decisions about which channels to increase your spending on and which channels to cut back on. For example, if you know that customers from Facebook have a far higher lifetime value than LinkedIn customers, you can increase your Facebook advertising budget and decrease your LinkedIn budget.

Goal conversion rate reports

With a goal conversion rate report, you can find out what percentage of contacts at each point on your campaign will achieve a selected goal based on past data. For each element on your map, you can see the total number and percentage of contacts who hit that step and eventually went on to achieve the goal.

How to use it

Being able to view this for each campaign element gives you the insight to understand how each piece contributes to the results of the whole. You’ll be able to understand the impact each individual email message, task, goal or condition had on the campaign’s overall conversion. For example, this report could show you what percentage of the contacts who opened an email ended up purchasing a product.

Goal conversion time reports

A goal conversion time report reveals how long it took contacts to achieve a selected goal from the time they entered your campaign. This can be any goal, not just purchases. You can measure how long it took them to do anything — open an email, fill out a survey, join your referral program, sign up for a free trial, or complete any other goal you’ve created on your campaign map.

How to use it

Knowing how long it takes contacts in your funnel to take action allows you to plan ahead and set better time-bound goals for your growth. It can also help you identify opportunities to push contacts through your funnels faster if it is taking too long for them to take the next step.

Goal conversion time reporting also comes in handy for managing your campaign promotion budget. By determining when you can expect new leads to convert, you’ll better understand how long your payback period might be from a campaign.

This report is also useful when deciding how to allocate your marketing budget to focus on the sources that convert fastest. Just as with other reports, you can filter your goal conversion time report by lead source to compare and contrast the behavior of leads from each different marketing channel. You might find that, although there’s no difference in lifetime value or even goal conversion rate, leads from different sources achieve the goal at different rates. This helps you decide which marketing channels to focus on for the fastest growth.

However, if your lifetime value is particularly high for one group of leads who also take a very long time to reach your set goals, it is probably worthwhile to continue investing in that source. With an understanding of how long it will take them to achieve the goal, you won’t have to worry about leads from that channel underperforming. Since you know that it’s just going to take them some time, you can simply wait for them to pay off instead of killing that lead source.

Goal conversion point reports

The final type of goal conversion report is the goal conversion point report. With this report, you can see exactly where contacts were on your map when they achieved the goal you select. Although it may seem similar to a goal conversion rate report, the advantage of this type of report is the ability to see exactly which elements on your map are the most effective at driving conversions.

Rather than merely understanding how likely it is that contacts on each element will convert, with a goal conversion report you can see a breakdown of where all the contacts who achieved the goal were on the map when they achieved it. This can make it even easier to understand which aspects of your campaign are the most effective for motivating leads and contacts to take action.

How to use it

One reason you might use this report is to get a better understanding of which emails in a long nurture sequence were the most effective at converting cold leads back into warm ones.

Let’s say that the goal you have for disengaged contacts is for them to fill out a form to earn a promo code they can use later. This lets you know that they’re now warm prospects again. If you added this group to a long-term lead nurturing sequence that sends them a series of emails each week for several months, you may want to understand which email is the most effective at motivating them to re-engage. A goal conversion point report would show you where contacts who filled out the promo code request form were on the map right before they took action, giving you a breakdown of which emails were the most effective.

The post How to Apply Your Marketing Data to Improve Results appeared first on The Ontraport Blog.

The data that automatically comes up in your dashboard, however, doesn’t always mean what you think. 

For example, you might see that you’ve earned thousands of clicks on a blog article and automatically assume that it’s your top-performing post. But would you still consider it a top-performing article if it had an incredibly high bounce rate and people only spent an average of five seconds on the page? 

Getting the marketing data you need isn’t always as simple as looking at your analytics tool’s dashboard presets; in fact, sometimes that information can actually be quite misleading! Here are five marketing data myths debunked.

Marketing Data Myth 1: Cost per click determines the effectiveness of your ad campaigns

Whether you’re running ads on Facebook, Google, LinkedIn or anywhere else online, it’s essential to know the metrics that determine whether a campaign is a success or failure. Use the wrong data and you risk pouring money into ineffective ads.

Lower cost upfront isn’t always better

Let’s say you’ve been running two ad campaigns for over a month — one running at $3.50 cost per click (CPC) and the other at $1. You check in on them daily and are growing to favor the $1 CPC ad for obvious reasons; you’re spending less than a third of the money on clicks for this campaign.

A month has passed with these same consistent results, so you stop the more costly ad. The next day, you notice that something horrifying has happened: Your sales came to a screeching halt. This can’t be possible, right? Unless you were looking at the wrong marketing data to begin with.

Dig deeper: Look at your ad ROI

Once the initial shock of halted sales wears off, you pull up all the numbers to compare the two ad sets in depth. Here’s what you find:

The seemingly more expensive ad was actually bringing in more leads — at nearly half the cost per lead. So you decide to dig deeper. Did they turn into customers?

Come to find out, the $3.50 CPC ad not only brought in a higher number of quality leads, but it also converted those leads into much higher-paying customers than the $1 ad, resulting in more revenue coming from the ad you’d once pinned as a failure.

The number you should have been calculating all along was return on investment (ROI). Here’s how to calculate it:

It’s a date

Why is ROI the magic number? Marketing analytics expert Scott Desgrosseilliers says, “Think about dating. If you’re trying to get married, cost per click is evaluating how much it cost you to take her to dinner. But the ROI is, ‘Did you fall in love or get married?’”

The answer is in the context: If your goal is to close more sales and generate more revenue, your ROI can’t be calculated by simply counting how many people clicked on your ad.

Marketing Data Myth 2: If the open rate is good, your email campaign is a success

While a high email open rate is a good sign, it’s not a definitive answer to whether your email was a success or failure. Think about your own inbox: How many emails do you open up just to clear your notifications?

It’s not about how many people open it; it’s about what they do after

Let’s say you send a promotional email every week on the same day at the same time to 1,000 subscribers. Your average open rate is 12%, but in the first week of April, you changed your copy and noticed that 20% of your subscribers opened it. This email must be better, right? Not necessarily.

It all goes back to your goal. Ask yourself the following questions:

1) Why am I sending out emails in the first place?

2) What do I hope to gain from them?

3) If I don’t achieve that goal with these emails, are they still a success?

Chances are, your ultimate goal is to generate sales and revenue from your email marketing campaigns. If that’s the case, there’s a whole different set of numbers that determine whether your campaign is a success or failure.

It’s all about revenue per email

Open rates and sales generated from emails don’t always go hand-in-hand. In fact, it’s completely possible to get a low number of opens, but those who do read your message are compelled to buy. There’s no way to know unless you dig into the numbers for revenue per email.

In order to accurately calculate revenue per email, set up tracked links and use “last click” information to determine whether or not a reader bought after clicking on a link within the email.

Marketing Data Myth 3: First-click attribution tells you your best source of sales

When it comes to attributing sales, one of the most common misconceptions is that first-click attribution is the only factor to consider. While first-click does tell you how a lead got in the door, it’s only a piece of the puzzle. It’s like asking a married couple how they ended up together — the smooth pickup line or fancy first date might have been where it all started, but the proposal and all the stuff in between is also an important part of the story. The same goes with first- and last-click attribution.

Combine first- and last-click attribution for the win

For marketers, the full story matters. In order to understand exactly what converted leads to customers, they not only need to know how they became aware of your brand, but also what nurtured them into the sale. 

When analyzing marketing data, first-click attribution shows you what attracted your customers to your business, while last-click shows you the last link they clicked on before converting. This is useful in telling you which of your assets are most convincing at prompting your desired result. With that information, you can adjust your campaigns to direct more traffic to that asset. This is why you should be using both first- and last-click attribution.

Marketing Data Myth 4: Number of page views determines landing page success

Views on your landing pages are a good sign, but they’re not the only sign. How many times have you clicked on a page only to realize it wasn’t what you were looking for and immediately closed it?

Page views are only on the surface

If you only look at the raw number of views your pages get, chances are you’ll be misled. Paying attention to metrics that are more meaningful is key in deciphering the numbers. Since there is no single KPI that can tell you the full story, you should be familiar with the metrics that can successfully direct your campaigns in the right direction.  

Instead of just looking at page views, a combination of metrics — such as time on page, unique visitors and percentage of article completed — are a better way to measure whether a page is performing well.

Let’s say you have two versions of your sales page: One has 12,000 page views and the other has 8,000. Similar to our CPC scenario, if your business is getting lots of sales, you might attribute that mostly to the page getting so many views. Your gut reaction may be to pull budget from the 8,000 page, but after doing so you see a dramatic drop in conversions.

Looking below the surface

After pulling up the numbers for both of your sales pages, you realize that the one with all the views was actually not performing well on a deeper level — the average page viewer only stuck around for a few seconds and didn’t scroll down the page at all. They also didn’t convert. You were surprised to find that the other page, however, had almost all unique views, with an average time on page of 116 seconds — long enough to make it through the content on your page and convert.

This scenario goes for any page: Just because it’s getting lots of traffic doesn’t mean it’s the right kind. There are several things that could be off — you’re targeting the wrong audience, your headline or description could be misleading, etc. Bottom line, in order to figure out which pages are really working, you have to dig a little deeper.

Marketing Data Myth 5: Cost per acquisition tells you how well your campaigns are performing 

Earning new customers can be expensive, so most marketers will jump at any chance they get to lower their cost per acquisition (CPA). The problem with this? CPA alone only tells you half the story.

What’s the other half of the story?

While a low CPA is a good sign, knowing what customers do after converting is actually key.

This is where looking at customer lifetime value (CLV) comes into play. Let’s say you have two active marketing campaigns running. When analyzing your marketing data, campaign one has a higher CPA than campaign two (meaning it costs more to earn each customer), but before making any decisions you decide to look further into the numbers.

After digging around, you discover that while campaign one was initially more expensive for recruiting customers, those particular customers tend to spend considerably more on your brand and are way less likely to churn than the ones who converted through the lower CPA campaign. Those customers also refer more new customers to you.

You realize that the campaign with the higher CPA pays off because it attracts customers with a higher CLV. In other words, it leads to more sales and higher revenue for your business.

Regardless of the area of your marketing you’re looking to optimize, being able to investigate past the surface level into your marketing metrics is key to working towards the results you’re really after. 

The post Are You Making Any of These 5 Common Marketing Data Mistakes? appeared first on The Ontraport Blog.