How To Make Your Digital Measurement Better
A mistake we run into time and time again with different businesses is poor measurement, whether it be with their website, social media, and/or online advertising.
It's literally losing out on opportunities to tweak your user experience, make your content marketing strategy more impactful, save time, the list goes on. And this is all because there were no measures set in place to grab data from these various sources such as their website, social media, and online advertising campaigns. Here's what we do to help those businesses to better how they measure so as to be able to benchmark and be more strategic with their internet marketing.
Google Google Google
The first place we start is with website data, and that means working with Google. We create a Google Analytics account that integrates with their website using special code that is inserted into their website's backend. From there we also configure code for Google Tag Manager, which pulls more specific actions and event data from user interactions with their website. We also set up tracking data through Google AdWords and/or AdSense (depending on whether they want to monetize their website by having ads appear throughout) so they can see how effective their online advertising campaigns perform if and when they choose to invest in that.
Social Media
Setting up social media tracking for measurement is a little uneven. You'll depend most on Google tracking to understand how traffic from social media networks interacts with your website. But with Facebook measurement can be more robust. With Facebook we would install Facebook pixel which gives you much richer data similar to how Google Tag Manager does. You insert a special piece of code into your website and make sure that Facebook can "talk" with your entire website so as to see how Facebook traffic interacts with your website and how your Facebook ads perform. While it would be fabulous to have all your data in one place for free, it's not reality. To see your social media stats you'll have to login to each of your accounts to export data (allow with Instagram you can only view stats on your phone). There is one alternative; you can invest in a social media data program like Rival IQ to have all your social media data to be pulled into one clean dashboard. But remember, you can always use Google to see how social traffic interacts with your website. But if you want to see specifically how your social media posts and ads perform, you'll need to do a little leg work or invest in a tool like Rival IQ as I mentioned.
It's debatable whether YouTube is a social media network, stats on your videos you'll have to login through your YouTube account to see them. You can of course look to Google Analytics to see how YouTube traffic interacts with your website.
Laying this foundation of measurement will help your business understand where it should focus its efforts and what to keep doing. It's time consuming for us but it is well worth it so that we can help our clients by giving them a birds eye view of their digital presence and advertising efforts through reporting.