Developing Your Advertising Campaigns

Plan quarterly advertising campaigns that align with your customer’s interests and capitalize on holidays and events. Advertising that appeals directly to your target market by focusing on their wants and needs will deliver a stronger ROI. Being consistent helps to improve brand awareness, and capitalizing on marketing opportunities surrounding events and holidays captures a larger share of the market at critical opportunities for potentially higher sales.

How to Decide Which Channels to Advertise On

Finding the right online channels to focus your advertising on can make a big difference in maximizing your ROI. Depending upon your industry, one particular channel might serve you better than another, so it pays to research competitors to see where they are focusing their advertising dollars.

Various channels include:

Google—ideal for service providers and niche businesses that can utilize highly targeted keywords.

Google AdWords—ideal for targeting potential customers or clients that might not be aware you exist.

Facebook—ideal for companies that are seeking to engage their audience, as well as attract a local target market. Facebook also allows for very specific targeting and budget controls, making it an optimal marketing tool.

LinkedIn—ideal for B2B companies. Using LinkedIn, you can source leads, engage in networking, and advertise to specific professions, companies or industries.

Keep in mind that you might benefit from cross-channel advertising, utilizing one or more of the above channels to cast a wider net, subsequently improving your conversion rate.

Analyze and Revise Your E-Commerce Marketing Strategies

Consistent analysis of your marketing strategy to determine whether it is effective or if it needs revision is key to ensuring you continue to reach sales goals. A marketing strategy that was highly effective one month can deliver less than optimal results the next month due to changing trends, consumer behavior and competitor marketing strategies.

There are several ways to gauge the impact of your marketing campaign. For starters, installing tracking pixels on your website will enable you to see which parts of your e-commerce advertising campaign are leading consumers to your website, and, ultimately, making a purchase happen. Google AdWords makes this process relatively simple, and other channels, such as Facebook, also enable you to set up conversion pixels.

Second, using analytics to measure your conversion rate from your ads can give you additional insight into your campaign and consumer behavior. Google Analytics offers a suite of tools and products that you can use to improve your engagement, track and analyze website traffic, increase your click-through rate, and much more.

And lastly, you can experiment with different creative content and ads in order to increase conversions through A/B testing on your website. This is the process of trying out two similar ads or pieces of content to see which one works better—conversion pixels and Google analytics can help you track and compare the effectiveness of either ad.

With the data you collect from analytical tools, conversion pixels, and A/B testing, you’ll be able to fine-tune your strategy on a weekly basis, as needed, in order to keep an optimal ROI.

The Benefits of Analyzing Your Digital Marketing Campaigns

The biggest benefit you get from marketing analysis is gaining actionable insights from your data. If you have a reliable way to extract value from your marketing information, then you can use it to improve over time.

Another advantage, especially if you have near-real-time reporting, is that you can quickly measure the impact of changes. If you alter a campaign while it’s running, you can see whether you’re attracting more prospects or fewer with your improvements. This rapid cycle is essential for dialing in on what your audience wants.

What Are Goals in Google Analytics?

Google Analytics, a powerful website analytics platform, can easily be integrated with your WordPress site. You can use the features from Analytics to collect and track important metrics, such as goal conversions.

When using Google Analytics, a goal is an action that you want the user to take. For example, your goal may be for someone to provide their email address for your newsletter, or to purchase a product. When you set a goal in Google Analytics, you make it possible to track user behavior that leads to this goal. The more you know about that behavior, the more you can increase that goal conversion.

Set and Track Goals

The Analytics platform makes it easy to set up goals. When you’re in the Admin section, you can select any type of view and click on the Goals header. A button appears with the label “+New Goal.”

You can use a provided template, leverage the smart goals feature, or specify the user behavior that is associated with that goal. Once you set up the goal, Google Analytics knows what to track in website traffic reporting.

When your goal is associated with a certain URL, such as a link from an email or a purchase page, you can add UTM parameters to that link to get more insight into your traffic’s behavior.

The Google Analytics Campaign URL Builder allows you to quickly add these parameters to your links. The only required parameter is the campaign source, which is the referrer. You can add the medium, name, term and content for unique URLs that provide deep insights into your traffic.

You can dive into this data by going to the Campaign section underneath Acquisition in your Google Analytics report.

Using Goals and UTM Parameters

One way you can use goals and UTM parameters is to track how many people end up purchasing your product after they engage with your email newsletter content. Your goal looks for users who go through the checkout process and reach the Thank You page, which appears after a successful transaction.

To do this, you would configure your UTM parameters for all of the links leading out from the emails sent to your newsletter list. The source would be a newsletter, the medium would be email, the campaign name should indicate when the email was sent and whether it went to a segmented list, and the campaign content should note the theme of that email or series.

Here’s how to set up a UTM URL just like in the image above:

• Enter the URL you’re sending to (such as a product or specific page on your site).
• Enter newsletter for the source.
• Email for the medium.
• And for the campaign name, make it as specific as you need to know what purpose this link served (see above).
• You can also add a term if you’re bidding on or targeting a specific keyword used in search.
• And you can even specify different delivery methods for A/B testing, such as a button vs. a text link.

When you look at your goals, you can see how many customers you acquired from your email newsletter, as well as the specific email that triggered the final conversion.

This information is invaluable for optimizing your marketing efforts and discovering areas where you can improve. Once you can quickly and conveniently access Google Analytics from WordPress, you have all the information you need right in front of you.