Are You Tracking Your Marketing?
A marketing campaign should do more than create activity. It should produce information that helps you understand what is working and where adjustments are needed.
Without tracking, a business may know that its advertisements received clicks or its website attracted visitors, but it may not know whether those interactions resulted in calls, inquiries, appointments, or sales.
Tracking connects marketing activity to meaningful business outcomes.
Start with your business goals
Before selecting metrics, identify what you want customers to do.
Your desired actions might include:
Calling your business
Completing a contact form
Scheduling an appointment
Requesting an estimate
Visiting a location
Purchasing a product
Signing up for a newsletter
Downloading a resource
The right metrics depend on the goal. A campaign designed to generate phone calls should not be evaluated solely by website traffic.
Track phone calls
Phone calls are an important lead source for many local businesses. Call tracking can help identify which advertisements, campaigns, or website visits contributed to those calls.
Useful call information may include:
Total calls
Call source
Call duration
Time and date
Answered and missed calls
Calls meeting an established conversion threshold
Google Ads supports call conversion measurement for calls from ads and, when configured properly, calls made from a phone number on a website. Google Ads Help
Call volume alone does not reveal lead quality, however. Businesses should also have an internal process for recording whether calls become qualified inquiries, appointments, or customers.
Measure website forms and important clicks
Contact forms, appointment requests, estimate requests, and purchases should be tracked as meaningful actions.
Other useful events may include:
Clicks on phone numbers
Clicks on email addresses
Appointment-button selections
File downloads
Newsletter registrations
Visits to confirmation pages
Google Analytics can measure important events, including specified form submissions and confirmation-page visits. Google Analytics Help
Tracking must be tested periodically. Website changes, new forms, software updates, and tag modifications can cause previously working measurements to stop recording correctly.
Review website traffic
Website traffic can show how people arrive at your site and which pages they visit. Important questions include:
Which marketing channels attract visitors?
Which pages receive the most traffic?
Do visitors use phones or computers?
Which pages lead to inquiries?
Where do visitors leave the site?
Are campaigns reaching the intended geographic area?
Traffic should be interpreted in context. An increase in visitors is encouraging, but attracting the right visitors and generating meaningful actions is more important than traffic alone.
Monitor search visibility
Google Search Console provides information about how a website performs in Google Search, including impressions, clicks, click-through rate, search queries, pages, countries, devices, and average position. Google Search Console Help
Monitoring this information can reveal:
Searches that display your website
Pages earning organic clicks
Keywords gaining or losing visibility
High-impression searches with low click-through rates
Differences between mobile and desktop performance
Opportunities for new or improved content
Search visibility should be reviewed over time rather than judged from a single day or week. Seasonality, competition, search behavior, website changes, and algorithm updates can all affect performance.
Turn data into decisions
Reports are only valuable when they guide action.
Tracking may show that an advertisement receives clicks but generates few inquiries. That could indicate a targeting, message, offer, or landing-page problem. A service page may receive significant traffic but produce no calls, suggesting that its content or call to action needs improvement.
Good marketing measurement helps businesses decide what to continue, change, expand, or stop.
Red Canary Marketing provides campaign tracking, Google Ads management, SEO monitoring, website analytics, and monthly reporting. Contact us to request an estimate for a measurable marketing strategy.
