Tracking your marketing activity is the first step to improving your marketing activities and identifying if they are supporting your business goals.
Set Realistic Goals
As part of your detailed Marketing plan you need to set realistic goals that allow you to stretch, but are achievable if you apply all the resources you have.
Begin by creating a few major goals and think of a few smaller goals to act as stepping-stones to achieving your larger goals. Stepping stone goals should be achieved in increments of 3,6 and 9 months to keep your on track to achieving your major goal.
The best criteria to setting an easy to track goal are with the SMART technique.
- Specific
- Measurable
- Achievable
- Realistic
- Timely
For example, gain 45,000 YouTube followers by December 1st. The company currently has 25,000 followers so by March we aim to have 30,000, June 35,000 and 40,000 in September to be able to reach our major goal by December 1st.
Determine what to Track
Your marketing goals determine what you should track. For example, if you are looking to increase traffic to your website by 20% this year, you might want to break down your traffic into measurement of visits by direct visitors, referrals from other sites, organic visits, clicks on paid advertisements etc.
Below is a list of common marketing goals and what you might track to measure the effectiveness of your activities in reaching your goal.
| Goals | Metrics |
| Sales | Online Sales, Offline Sales, Return Purchase Ratio, Average Sale Amount |
| Lead Generation | Enewsletter Subscriptions, Downloads, Form Completion, |
| Engagement | Likes, Shares, Tweets, Comments, Pins, Forwards, Inbound Links |
Tracking Tools
Tracking is necessary not only when a major campaign is being run but all year around to monitor results across all of your marketing activities, so implementing tracking tools that can easily be updated is essential. A very simple way to do this is to create a spreadsheet with a dashboard of key performance indicators that relate to your goals.
Additionally many online tools, such as Adwords and Google Analytics allow you to set automated weekly and monthly reports to be sent straight to your email. These results can then be incorporated into your Dashboard for easy comparison with other activities.
Allocate Responsibility
Allocate responsibility to an individual or team and prioritise incorporating marketing tracking into their tasks. Base line in January and schedule times to view how progress is going either weekly, monthly or quarterly. Using a shared spread sheet or dashboard on Google Docs allows multiple people to easily access, update and track the business’s marketing goals.
Refine Goals
What you track overtime may shift so evaluate metrics regularly to ensure your focus is on capturing the best and most relevant data required for your business and align with your goals. Sometimes you can fall short of reaching your stepping stone goals so refine your goal, adapt your content or strategy and continue with working towards your goal.
It is crucial to track your marketing activities for your business to understand what content and strategies is having the largest impact on your audience. Deep insight is gained by tracking goals, which assists in developing your businesses’ marketing efforts in the future.