Local businesses are seeing increased costs of advertising and marketing with a decreasing conversion. There are many factors that cause this downward slope for local businesses including fear of technology, misconceptions of performance, over estimating the audience, and shear lack of planning. Local business marketing campaign tracking can focus marketing efforts to aid the small business owner in making better marketing decisions and lower overall marketing expenses for the higher return on investment. For local small businesses, offline marketing campaigns are quite common. With the integration of both offline and online marketing tools and resources, a complete local business marketing campaign tracking system can be created.
What is local business marketing campaign tracking?
The simplest way to explain local business marketing campaign tracking is to visualize it. In the graphic below, you can see each point in the campaign’s visitor’s path, in this case a mailer for a campaign from an ongoing campaign.
As the campaign progresses, certain points mark where conversion takes place. These conversion points can be tracked and placed into an equation to determine the overall effectiveness and affordability of the campaign.
Why is tracking needed?
Local business marketing campaign tracking is a necessary concept in finding the ideal campaign method and strategy for a local business. Without campaign tracking, optimizing would be pointless and no measurable return could be identified. In its most basic form, a small business will try to determine the effectiveness of a campaign by counting the number of sales and identify a change. With so many variables that can affect the sale outcome, the effectiveness is solely based on assumption. To avoid making critical assumptions, simple tracking can be added to any marketing campaign to improve decision making. This informative practice can lead to campaign focusing, optimization, and overall reduced marketing costs. The result of learning from tracked marketing campaigns can increase the ROI and reduce unnecessary frustration.
Putting tracking into practice
Starting a campaign and putting your marketing campaign tracking for local business should be done all in one motion and not seen as a separate processes. The tracking is simply a feature of the campaign. For ongoing and new marketing campaigns, assess the points in the campaign where conversion takes place, such as where the domain is seen, a URL is clicked on, a landing page is viewed, and a purchase occurs. These will be tracking points that can be tracked separately and as a group. Once tracking has been set for a campaign, conversions will begin to be recorded. Over time, the data generated can be translated into the crucial information for optimizing the campaign to improve conversion performance. The bonus for understanding and using marketing campaign tracking is to know that the same process can be used on many campaign types or recycled into future campaigns.
Marketing Domains & Redirects
Depending on the type of campaign, traffic can be directed from offline to online marketing assets via marketing domains. These domains are separate from your business website domain and serve only one purpose as a tracking parameter for the current marketing campaign. Often, the domain used is campaign specific and uses keywords from the campaign in the domain name. Marketing domains redirect traffic to a specific landing page or website for the campaign. Domains are relatively inexpensive and can be reused for future campaigns. Sub-domains and URL redirects are also popular and effective conversion parameters for marketing, however they are not as effective for offline to online conversion.
Integrating into existing Marketing
Where can my local business begin to track our campaigns?
Tracking can be used in many local business marketing campaigns. Here are some popular examples:
Advertising
- Newspapers
- Third-party Websites
- Magazines
- Billboards
- Events
- Sponsorships
Marketing Collateral
- Business Cards
- Stationary
- Flyers
- Brochures
- Booklets
- Promotional Items
Tracking Tools and Resources
In order for traffic to be recorded, tracking needs to be placed on the local business website or web pages involved in the campaign process. Collected data can be displayed in a report fashion, along with historical and comparison data to view the campaign(s) over time.
Mediaryte recommends Google Analytics
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a detailed and feature rich website tracking tool. With many variables tracked, vast information can be quickly gathered through a series of screens. In terms of local business marketing campaign tracking, a local business can see the geographic location of the website visitors, their site entry and exits points, and click throughs to conversion. For eCommerce websites, the addition of customer tracking can give additional information of time to checkout with product and purchase monitoring.
Now that you have a better understanding of local business marketing campaign tracking, it is time to put it into action. Using the concepts mentioned in the article can be applied to your business marketing.
Recommend additional uses for marketing campaign tracking
If you have additional ideas and practices that can be applied, please share your experiences and processes in the comments.