Put yourself in this scene:

Your new website has all the bells and whistles: striking design, an on-site search function, video content and at the bottom of each page, a contact form for users who want to learn more. Plus, your team spent weeks hashing out the media strategy to drive the right people to the right landing page. You’ve seen strong engagement with your site, but want to find ways to make it even better. Or, maybe people haven’t been interacting with your site in the way you’d expected, and you’re starting to think something might be up.

Think of Tracking as Digital Gold

One of the major benefits of digital marketing is that every action is measurable. With the right Tracking setup, you can dig into what’s going well (so you can keep up the good work) and what’s not (so you can optimize it to improve the campaign). It’ll help you make informed decisions based on data—first-party data that you collect yourself or data from a third party—rather than taking shots in the dark based on personal experiences and gut feelings. That means you’re able to make exactly the changes that need to be made and clearly see the results.

Additionally, stakeholders often want in-depth reporting that breaks out their marketing return-on-investment and shows which tactics are most—and least—impactful for their business. This is all possible with proper data collection and configuration implementation.

Set Yourself Up for Success

In order to ensure you have the right data when you need it, the following needs to be in place:

1. Set up tracking parameters on all URLs that drive traffic to your website so you can document the source of that traffic and attribute onsite actions (like purchases and leads captured,) to the particular tactic they came from—and optimize accordingly.

2. Place pixels on user actions and landing pages across the site. This will help you measure performance and create retargeting audiences for various platforms, such as Facebook, Search Ads 360, or Google Ads. If people visit your site and/or take specific actions, you want to make sure to keep your messaging front-and-center with them and understand its impact.

3. Set up user interaction tracking to get an in-depth view into what users are doing across the website. This information will help you target more specific audiences, update your user experience to encourage conversion and provide reporting on micro-conversions that indicate intent to engage with the brand in some way.

4. Configure an analytics platform to pull in all that data in a clean and accurate format so it can be easily used by the team to glean insights for optimization. Pro tip: At 90octane, we like to leverage platforms like Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager (GTM) for our clients’ analytics needs. Combining specialized products like these allows us to implement robust tracking without needing to tap developers—leaving them free to focus on more pressing site updates.

Bottom line—tracking is crucial for collecting accurate and meaningful data that we then use to make our programs intelligent and data-driven. Want to learn more about the benefits of effective tracking and what we can do to help? Reach out to us.