When it comes to small businesses and small nonprofits, measuring your marketing analytics is an important step. Analytics help you keep an eye on the success of your marketing strategy, make data-driven decisions, and optimize your marketing efforts.
What is working for your business and what isn’t? Measuring marketing analytics will give you the answers you need to make the necessary improvements.
Here are a few of our best practices for measuring marketing analytics.
Define clear goals
Like anything in your marketing strategy, it all starts with clearly defined goals. You need to know your key objectives, so you know exactly what to track. Are you aiming to increase sales, create more traffic to your website, boost your engagement rates, or all of the above? The more specific you are about your goals, the easier they are to track.
Choose the right marketing analytics tools
Next is identifying how you’re going to manage your analytics. What tools and systems will you be using? There are lots of options here, and many of them are free or relatively low cost. For example, you can use Google Analytics and Google Search Console for website tracking and SEO insights. For social media analytics, you can pull data from each individual platform or see what analytics are available through your scheduling tool. The same goes for your email marketing platform, whether you’re using Mailchimp, Constant Contact, Hubspot, or something else.
Track the right metrics
To know what’s working, you need to be tracking the right metrics, but it’s a lot of information to sift through with each platform. Here are some key metrics to consider tracking:
- Website: look at traffic sources, page views, bounce rate, and conversion rates.
- Social media: look at reach, engagement rate, follower growth, and click-through rates.
- Email marketing: look at open rates, click rates, and conversions, if applicable.
You can create a simple spreadsheet and pull in these metrics once a month to get started. Once you get into a groove of regularly monitoring your marketing analytics, it gets easier!
Final thoughts
For many small businesses and small nonprofits, your analytics may not change much from month to month. Don’t get frustrated or discouraged by low numbers or numbers that don’t change quickly! Consistency pays off over time, so if you’re just starting to track your marketing analytics and making decisions based on those numbers, give it time.
Do you want to start tracking and managing analytics for your business or organization but not sure where to start? StoryPath can help. Contact us today to schedule an intro call.