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Tracking the Buyer’s Journey from your Online Presence
Tracking Online Presence Effectiveness
A major challenge marketers face is the ability to collect and analyze information from their multiple online sources on their customers, communities, and audiences into one place so that they can quickly gain insight into what is working.
Metricool is a social media dashboard and so much more – ad manager, editorial calendar, and most importantly a real-time data/analytics platform for social and ad outreach. The platform solves the problem of collecting all your online presence metrics into one spot for analysis. These important metrics — along with other key buyer’s journey information — help your brand understand the impacts of your online advertising and outreach.
When it comes to measuring direct response, it is a bit tougher because you need to delve deeper into the journey to find the full story and really get conversion results. This means we need to use a few different techniques in tandem to measure impact and understand which ads or other digital outreach are driving the most sales.
Ways to Better Track Online Conversions
Coupon Codes are a traditional way to measure advertising effectiveness and they have been used for a long time. The easiest online version of coupon codes is using a vanity URL or landing page to measure website visits coming in from online sources on other platforms.
“Visit MarysMuffinsWebsite.com for a free coffee with any purchase”, or “go to myproductwebsite.com/trial for a free, no-hassle trial”
Tracking Text In is an easy way for prospects to reach out to advertisers via their smartphone. You can collect prospect phone numbers and automatically send them coupon codes or offers they requested.
“Text #sample to us at 555-GET-SOAP to get a free sample to try before you buy”
Tracking Phone Numbers is another important method of tracking online effectiveness and offers a better choice than a website if a conversation is the better way to progress the buyer’s journey. This is usually the case for cleaners, plumbers, and other quote-based businesses.
“Call 1-888-plumbers to get started”
Tracking Link Clicks from paid ads, social posts, and popup ads is definitive way to track inbound traffic and can be done easily with tracking links.
Centralized ROI on Digital Outreach
All these tracking methods must be integrated to get an accurate conversion count, avoid double counting prospects who come in on different channels, and ensure the ad source is connected to a real prospect or customer. ActiveDEMAND enables effective social, ads, and other online result tracking because you can build campaigns inside ActiveDEMAND that include:
- Landing pages with offers to match your ad campaign
- New tracking phone numbers set-up in under a minute (even search by word so you can find that “1-888-MYOFFER” style phone number)
- Tracked links inside each social campaign
- Text-in campaigns to automatically respond to inbound prospects
- Dashboard to see real-time results
- Emailed reports on KPIs of the campaigns – scheduled automatically daily, weekly, or monthly
This last piece is probably the most crucial: because ActiveDEMAND also handles tracking other advertising and attribution across multiple visits, even for anonymous users, you can see how your online presence influences buyers who may need a couple of visits to convert. Tracking the full buyer’s journey provides full context that is lost if you are only relying on “last touch” style attribution.
Close the Online Outreach to Final Conversion Loop
Establishing your online presence takes time and money, so using an online analytics platform like Metricool to deploy and optimize your social media, ad spend and other outreach efforts ensures your brand is reaching your target audience.
Now that you’ve ‘led the horse to water’, can you ‘make it drink?’ Tracking how online outreach translates into conversions is dependent upon the customer data. When you can close the loop on marketing initiatives and final sales, you can optimize and improve. In other words, understand the customer and then use that information to better market to them, and that requires the right tools.
Metricool helps those looking to extend their online digital marketing. The platform allows advertisers to set up and run targeted online campaigns quickly and track results in real-time. When paired with a marketing automation platform like ActiveDEMAND, users extend their online campaign tracking capabilities to phone calls, texts, tracked keywords, links, and more. ActiveDEMAND’s range of native CRM integrations takes it one step further so brands can completely close the loop around customer behavior, sales, and digital online marketing.