The day has finally come to roll out your new marketing campaign. As a marketer or webmaster, you’re feeling great. You have created both online and offline tactics and you’re driving traffic to a landing page that’s clean, to-the-point and ready to convert site visitors into patients.
One small detail remains: How will you track your efforts and report on the success of your campaign?
The Case for Data-Driven Decision Making
Data should drive your marketing decisions. There are countless platforms to help you collect data and determine which of your tactics are delivering the best results.
Ultimately, your data will answer the perennial question your team will ask: “Did our campaign work?”
Let’s take a look at how to extract data from your tools to tell the story of how your marketing campaign is performing.
Digging into the Data
It’s important to look at the data collected from a variety of tools – don’t focus on just one source of data. And it’s important to do this each week (or daily!) during your campaign so you can adjust your tactics accordingly. The correlation between platforms is where you’ll find the story or the “Ah-Ha!” moments that drive action for your team.
Let’s walk through a few tools you might consider using and how they can help you determine the best course of action. We’ll evaluate a hypothetical landing page for our campaign.
Google Analytics
Starting with Google Analytics is a great way to get baseline data and a few insights into how users are interacting with your landing page. Pageviews, time on page, bounce rate and traffic sources are just a few of the metrics you’ll want to check out.
These all provide some great insights, but you need to dig deeper than Google Analytics.
CrazyEgg
The purpose of a landing page is to convert visitors on your website. CrazyEgg helps you gather heatmaps, scrollmaps and more to understand how visitors use the landing page you’ve created.
Do they convert on your call-to-action? Do they wander off through other links on the page? Gathering this information should help your team constantly tweak your landing page for the best results.
Use the data gathered from CrazyEgg alongside your Google Analytics data and you’ll begin to see trends.
A/B Testing
If you’ve found that your data isn’t conclusive, it may be time to add more data. You could consider launching an A/B test for the landing page.
You may want to test two different calls to action or the navigation to see how users react. Either way, testing ideas and gathering data is the best way to guide your decisions.
At Geonetric, we use Optimizely and/or Google Experiments to run our A/B tests. Either platform is a good way to get started.
Integrate Data into Your Processes
Ultimately, all of this data needs to become the bedrock of your marketing efforts.
Often, marketing teams make decisions based on past experiences or gut feelings. In today’s environment, data can—and should—be the catalyst for making decisions about your campaigns.
If your team isn’t looking at the data regularly, none of this matters. Be sure to bring these numbers to team meetings and discuss the good, the bad and the ugly.
With the right tools, a process for analyzing the numbers and a willingness to trust the data, your website and marketing campaigns can deliver the results you’re seeking.
If you’re looking to create effective digital strategies that use data to make decisions, let’s talk.