How We Track Marketing Efforts
These days there still remains a lot of unknowns on how to Track Marketing Efforts. One can easily get lost in all the mixed results. How did that item sell? Which ad was it? Was that an organic sale or a banner ad? Of course not everyone needs to their track marketing efforts. Many rely on this when spending say $10,000 US a day on advertising. But how about those spending $1 a day? To us, does not matter how much your budget is. It matters is are you able to track marketing efforts or not.
I’m writing this article today based on a phone call that had some surprising highlights. Something that was missing within the clients multi-million dollar yearly sales business. While it’s great to see sales come in every minute there is still a guessing game. A ballpark 15% or more of the sales client does not knowing how it sold online.
Social media, word of mouth, sharing, likes, pay per click
That list can go on and on and with all these various methods an actual sale can come from one or a combination of events above that triggered that completed checkout. I was a little shocked to hear this phrase.
“We send tons of traffic to the website, but clueless what sold what”
Of course this is a very special situation and they come to me asking for a Free Consultation. I was happy to provide them with a listening ear, brainstorm and provide a solution. After about 30 seconds of brainstorming I had the answer. My reply was with a question. I know how to fix most of the issues your having, just one question “do you offer live chat on the landing page or in this case within the admin control panel, website etc”?
No, we do not have Live Chat.
Client advised they only have tech support via 3rd party setup that does not provide any tracking per contract. This is a special situation where the customer is purchasing ad’s to promote their product on a 3rd party marketplace that does not provide any tracking. This is something that should be attacked on both sides.
What’s the fix?
- In this case, I replied with for sure you need to get the 3rd party to understand the value of providing such data – more sales for both is the result!
- We’ve used a few different live chat software platforms in our 15 years of web design services. One of the best things about live chat is you instantly see visitor details in the live chat dashboard. Love being able to tell where they came from as in the ref url. Some even can fetch the keyword, location, computer type, versions of windows etc.. but that would not be interesting to everyone. It’s good to know what your clients are using so your app or website is working or looking correct to them tho.
Now of course when people think of live chat they think oh that’s a huge expense, I do not have the time or manpower to take all the request. In this case, you hide the live chat but allow it to track for you so you have data via the dashboard.
When a sale comes in, you take a peek at the dashboard and see the buyer is in checkout.
Other ways to Track Marketing Efforts
In your promos, advertising, ppc etc.. you can put in a code Winter2018 for them to use after checkout for example. They land on your welcome page or within the software you’ve sold them. A live chat is best for us but of course it’s not for everyone. You can however hide the live chat and use the optional “ticket message” this way the client can fill out a short form and get a bonus download or discount on next purchase.
With this you can make a different promo code for each ad or more specific ad promos using numbers, mixed or even other words. It’s up to you!
Suggested Live Chat software we’ve tested the following:
The above are affiliate links as Snerdey.com website is sometimes paid a referral fee. That is if you actually sign up so please use our links above to learn more. We actually use both as we have other websites that we manage. Also tested free live chats, paid ones and found that there is actually a large difference. When it comes to how to track marketing efforts one needs to know what it is you need in regards to reports, sales and how it sold.
It’s good problem to have “sales” but if you can pinpoint what sold. Then you can reduce the amount of funds being spent on a blanket effort just by knowing how to track marketing efforts.
If you’d like a Free Consultation we’re ready when you are!