Tracking Protocols for Your Website
The very first thing you need to do to track the effectiveness of your website is to install analytics on your site. Most people like using Google Analytics because Google is still the first search engine that you need to please to get more traffic and audience members. You can follow this checklist for what to set up in Google Analytics to track.
Understand Your Website’s Traffic
Where is the traffic originating? Is it due to ads or content marketing? Is the traffic trending up or down, and can you point to why? Which pages of your site get the most traffic, and why? How many people stick to your site versus bounce, and can you determine why? Do audience members who visit your site with a mobile device react differently from those who visit with their desktop computer?
Check Your Website’s Search Engine Optimization
Review your tag titles, meta descriptions, headings, subheadings, and structure. Plus, double-check your backlinks and internal links for effectiveness. Ensure you are using internal linking appropriately and the right keywords in the right way. These SEO issues can play an essential factor in whether your site is working in the way you intended it to or not. Don’t forget to double-check your search engine results regularly too.
Fix Your Page Speed and Page Errors
Every now and then, double-check your page load times. This is so important for proper results because people don’t wait around for slow sites to load. Plus, they don’t really like going to an error page, so make sure you fix any broken links regularly. Also, you can optimize your error pages to help your audience find more content.
Monitor the Behavior of Your Visitors
Using the right metrics, you can also monitor the behavior of site visitors. What are they clicking? What are the main links and calls to action that you want them to notice? How your visitors interact with your pages is also important because their behavior should drive your actions. In this way, you’re going to be able to identify the things that genuinely persuade your visitors to act.
Evaluate Landing Page or Sales Page Effectiveness
Monitor everything about your landing pages, for example, where did the visitor click through from to get here, and what happened after they did? Whatever you can monitor in between and before and after will provide vital information to help you improve the effectiveness of your sales pages.
Double-check to ensure that you are really capturing the right data with the analytics software that you’re using. Establish the goals you want to track and measure, and then set it up to track what you want to know. Ensure that everything is set up, including IP filters, site search, AdWords, in-page analytics, and more through Google Analytics to get started testing, tracking, and measuring.
Tracking Protocols for Your Email
If you want to track your email marketing to ensure that you’re getting the most out of your efforts, you need to understand the process of starting to track your email marketing. While it is about open rates, unsubscribes, and click-through rates, there is a lot to set up to ensure you can get this information from the actions of your audience. This email marketing checklist will help you remember what to do.
Know Your Objectives
Is your email going to be used to upsell a customer, cross-sell something else, onboard a user, nurture a lead, start, or build a sales pitch or something else entirely? Set up the objectives, then determine your key performance indicators (KPIs) such as cost of leads, value of a lead, conversion rates, time to conversion, and anything else you want to track.
Set Up Each Email Correctly
You’ll want to name your campaign, set up a sender name with a reply email that is friendly to your viewer. Plus, give it a compelling subject line, make it keyword rich and make sure it is sent to the right demographic and segment of your audience. The subject line should get the email recipient’s attention and make them curious enough to open the email. Don’t forget the call to action. Take the time to include all aspects of each email and email campaign because it’s all-important, and each little thing makes a huge difference in results.
Create the Email Content You Need
The content you include in the email always depends on your goal for the email, the audience member receiving it, and their intent on checking it. You can use a mixture of original and private label content in your email marketing. If you’re an affiliate marketer, you can use done-for-you content from your affiliate programs in each email. Create the content with your audience of one in mind in terms of the content inside and how it looks when they receive it.
Optimize the Call to Action
Once you’ve determined your call to action, whether it’s for them to go read another article, download a PDF, refer a friend, or to make a purchase or anything else, you need to ensure that it fits the overall message and tone of your brand. Remember that action words work best when it comes to developing effective CTAs. Sign up. Subscribe. Try free. Get started now. These are all effective, but you can do even better. “Yes! I want to improve my traffic now” is more effective than sign up now.
Proofread to Improve Conversions
While you don’t have to be perfect, and mistakes happen all the time, you should attempt to eliminate grammar and spelling errors. Check your spelling, punctuation, and ensure that your facts are correct too. Check all links to ensure that they work. If you can prove it, showcase that you can prove it. If you can’t prove it, don’t say it. If you do make mistakes, always own up to them by sending another email as soon as you know, correcting your errors. This gives you another opportunity to connect and increase engagement.
Double Check All Links
Go through your email to ensure that each link really works as you think it will. You want the pages to load fast and the branding to look right. If you send your visitors to another page that isn’t yours, ensure you point that out before they go to it, so they’re not surprised. If it’s your landing page, there needs to be consistency with the source document to the link for it to feel safe to your audience.
Send a Test Email
Don’t ever send out an email without testing it first. You want to look at what this email looks like in a variety of email systems such as Google and Outlook. Nothing sucks quite as much as sending out an amazing offer that looks horrible and is not understandable due to a problem. Preview all emails on various browsers, tablets, mobile devices, and so forth too.
Set up analytics in your email by using the right code in your emails as per your email marketing software. For example, adding personalization to your email message using the email software will give you another data point to track. Allowing your email software to track conversions is key to ensuring your email marketing is working as planned.
Tracking Protocols for Social Media
Just like you want to monitor the data you generate in email marketing, on your website, and elsewhere, you also want to track everything you do on social media to ensure that you’re not wasting your time. There is no point sharing things without a goal in mind and some idea of what you want to happen based on your knowledge of the industry and your audience.
Set Your Goals
When you set your goals, always use SMART goal setting practices so that every goal you set is specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely. This simply means that you need to have enough information in your goal that it is easy to track, plus of course, it should be a goal that is possible to meet; otherwise, there is no point in it.
Some potential goals to set are:
- Reach – Reach 10,000 new viewers within a four-week campaign period.
- Engagement – Receive 1000 likes and 100 comments during the four-week campaign period.
- Following – Get 1000 more followers within the four-week campaign period.
- Traffic – Earn 1000 click-throughs during the four-week campaign period.
- Leads and Prospects – Earn 1000 leads during the four-week campaign period.
- Revenue – Convert 50% of the clicks to paying customers during the four-week campaign period.
Goal setting is one of the most important parts of the process. Take the time to brainstorm the type of goals you want to reach so that you can create a campaign that will succeed. Consider thinking about it this way: If you do this task, you expect these results, because of the research you’ve done.
Figure Out Your Priorities
When you start brainstorming your goals, you may begin to go nuts with how many goals you have before you. It may seem like too much work and be overwhelming. Take a deep breath and prioritize your goals and ideas based on your overall business goals. Then just put the things you want to accomplish in a logical order. For example, you may want to work on traffic earning most at first.
Test Your Ideas
Until you have someone to help you or you’re used to doing this, try only one thing at a time. Develop your goal and set up the steps required to reach the goal successfully. Then test one thing at a time. For example, if you want to test your ability to generate traffic using social media to your site, you might want to share content from your website with blurbs and CTAs on different social media platforms. Tweak each headline to figure out what works best for your audience.
Study the Data
As you study the data that you’re generating, learn from the data to figure out if your assumptions worked or if they were wrong. What actions did you take to create the success or failure you’ve experienced? What else can you learn from the test that generated the data?
Act on The Data
When you receive the results of your test, you’ll want to act on the data. If you’ve figured out that the headline you created was very clickable and generated enough views and clicks to accomplish what you wanted, then you’ll want to put this on steroids by turning it into a PPC campaign. If it is not generating enough of what you wanted, then you will need to tweak it and do the test again.
Repeat
Do this process for each goal that you set. Set it up from A to Z and then let it run for at least a week then check the data. Use the data generated to guide your choices and decisions going forward, trying one new thing at a time so that the data doesn’t get corrupted.
Following this protocol to do more testing and tracking of your social media is really a no-brainer. Obviously, you’ll have to adjust this for your own niche and the goals that you want to set, but this can get you started down the right path.
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