Many businesses that I meet with still can’t answer the question: where do your sales come from? Yet each month they spend money on advertising and marketing efforts. If sales grow year over, they attribute it to the marketing of the last year and repeat until they hit a slump.
Well that can get you to a certain point, but is it the best use of your money? Well, you don’t know, I guess it could be. Or you could just use marketing attribution and start to know what’s going on.
What is Marketing Attribution?
This is pretty self explanatory, but in brief, it’s using tracking to attribute a conversion to a marketing effort or channel. Pretty simple – let’s move on.
How Can You Start Tracking Marketing ROI?
There’s a number of ways that you can do this. The simplest and first step we always take is to set up conversion tracking in Google Analytics. It’s a free way to get some insight into what online activities are working.
If you’re going to be doing offline marketing the best way to track it is through landing pages. Unique landing pages for any offline work will help you see if it’s driving traffic to your website. If you are an e-commerce store, using promotional codes for offline activities can tell you the success of any offline activity as well.
How Do You Know if it Lead to a Sale?
Where analytics drops off is telling you which opportunities actually lead to sales. Because you can have great stats in terms of marketing success, but if they don’t lead to sales, none of it matters.
For this we use the marketing tool SharpSpring. It helps us see which channels lead to from marketing opportunities, and then which converted into sales. From there we can make investment decisions as to where we want to put time and money in from month-to-month.
Conclusion>
When you’re a small business it can seem like having insights is impossible or a big business thing to do. But it’s not, it’s not even that expensive compared to other advertising and marketing outlets. But it’s the one thing you can do in marketing to not mis-spend money in the future.
After that it’s just having the fortitude to make the tough decisions. You may not get best news, like what you think is working, may not be. So as long as you can take your own advice and make marketing changes based on what does work and what doesn’t, you’ll be on your path to success in no time.