Tracking Your Investment

The advantages of digital advertising make it one of the most efficient ways to spend your marketing dollars. Those who have tried even one campaign love the fact that every single penny can be accounted for with analytics.

Technology is advancing at super-sonic speed prying into human behavior deeper with every continuing advancement.  Future minds are designing algorithms to predict human behavior; as of today, we can only look back and optimize future experiences.  It is amazing how a simple piece of code (also known as a pixel) provides an enormous opportunity to better serve your customers.

How Tracking Works

In order to explain how tracking works without getting too technical I will use the words of Josh Dreller (@mediatechguy), a media technologist and guest writer at Search Engine Land who explains this process in plain English:

The concept is fairly simple. You will generate a small snippet of code from the engine platform and place it on various pages of your website (it’s invisible to users). When a user clicks one of your ads, their browser is cookied with that information. If that same user reaches one of those pages with the engine code, a conversion is recorded. So, if you want to see if someone filled out a lead gen form or completed a sale, you would put the conversion code on the thank you/order confirmation/receipt page which comes up after they’ve completed an action. For retail sites, there are special ecommerce tracking codes which can be set to record the order amount, number of products, names of products, etc. So, for example, instead of seeing that keyword #1 brought in 100 conversions last month, you actually see 100 conversions that equaled $1295 in sales. This is obviously a very good way to compare your PPC spend with the actual sales generated.

Sometimes, we have to tweak websites in a special way in order to have a thank you page to tag with the conversion code. If a website’s goal is to get users to watch their videos, sometimes, instead of putting all of the videos on one page, a list of links are offered. This way, when a user chooses a link to go watch the video, the code can be applied there in order to track that conversion.

Based on Josh’s explanation we hope to have conveyed the importance of a well-defined goal for any marketing initiative followed by the proper tracking to measure overall ROI of your investment.  Should you find yourself with a live campaign with no conversion tracking please contact us here at knoodle and we can place you on a positive ROI path towards high profitability.