As a person directly responsible for marketing campaigns, there is a pretty high probability that every day you launch a new one. This involves creativity, research, actual implementation and, obviously, the preparation of reports for the client. The challenge comes when we count conversions and don’t know which communication channel to attribute them to. Yes, we know that they have been generated, but we cannot form plans to adapt the future strategy if we do not have a clear vision of the current campaign.
As an entrepreneur, you need to be aware of the importance of measuring results and reporting on them. This will help you make decisions about the budgets allocated to each channel in the future. To measure conversions, most of the time you only need a link that contains the parameters necessary to track them.
There are tools that come to our aid and thanks to which we can go through the flow practiced by the client, to identify exactly where each conversion comes from. Google Analytics has developed its own tool that tracks conversions and provides precise details about where conversions are coming from. Thus, their tracking can be done by inserting UTM parameters.
UTM parameters are those short text codes that are added to the campaign URL, precisely for a more careful monitoring of the recorded data. They are interpreted in analytics programs, more specifically Google Analytics. As mentioned before, Google Analytics gives consumers the opportunity to measure their conversions with the help of a URL Builder.
In order to better understand the whole process, its benefits, we will work concretely on an example. We will take the “Marketing Consulting” service, making 2 different posts, one on the Facebook page as a static post and one for a Facebook Ads campaign.
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Facebook post
According to the image below, we need information such as:
- The URL of the website to which we will refer in our post;
- The environment in which it will run, more precisely on Facebook;
- The type of campaign (if it is PPC or banner), and in this case we have a post;
- The name of the campaign, which helps us to identify it more easily in Analytics;
At the end, you can fill in a few more fields that are not mandatory, but they help to measure more accurately, if you opt for them. We will limit ourselves strictly to the mandatory ones, which, by the way, are sufficient in the current context.
The generated URL is taken either exactly as it appears in the link, or it is chosen to be abbreviated. Regardless of which choice you choose, the results will be the same and conversions can be measured in Analytics.
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Post for Facebook Ads
The strategy for monitoring conversions is almost identical, the only change is that instead of “post”, under “Campaign Medium” we will write “CPC”. Thus, the new URL will look like this: https://klain.ro/servicii/consultanta-marketing/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=sales
It seems easy at first glance to track these conversions, and in this case the reality reflects this. Next, we will visit Google Analytics to identify where we will find the results of the 2 posts.
Since we’ve named both posts “sales,” they’ll appear together, like this:
Once we access the campaign, the data will look like in the image below. This way, we’ll know exactly the number of conversions generated for each medium. In addition to this figure, in Google Analytics we can identify information such as: the number of users, the number of sessions, the pages accessed, the time spent on the page and the conversions generated (in this case how many people filled out the contact form).
This makes it easy to track every conversion, regardless of its nature. It becomes easier to optimize your previous campaigns based on current results.
Website banners
To give you a broad view of campaigns and the importance of conversion tracking, we’ll complement the example with the banners on your website as well.
Thus, if you own a website, and the implementation strategy includes the placement of a banner that refers to the campaign, it is important that the URL contains the necessary parameters for tracking conversions. The website is the online store of any business, which is “open” 24 hours a day, ready to meet any customer need.
In this context, the banner must lead the customer to the campaign, and it is important to be able to track its origin. Next, we will present where exactly both the banner and the URL to the campaign should be inserted.
