Marketing Analytics 101: Measure Your Campaigns Effectively

Marketing your online shop is a combination of art and science, with science being the attempt to quantify the impacts of the art. Marketing Analytics 101.

Understanding what is and isn't working in your marketing initiatives will help you apply what you've learned to future projects.

This is where marketing analytics comes into play. You may gain more detailed insights about your consumers, the kind of things they buy, and how they interact with your marketing and utilize that knowledge to increase your sales.

What is marketing analytics?

Traffic, clicks, transactions, and bounce rate are the metrics (marketing campaign analytics) that show you how well a marketing effort like a Facebook ad, email, or blog post worked. You may decide on future campaigns more effectively by analyzing this data.

You may monitor certain marketing activities using campaign analytics at each stage of the consumer journey both within and outside of your marketing channels, such as:

• Ads: e.g., how many click-throughs were generated by variations A, B, and C of the same ad.
• Social media: e.g., whether your Instagram traffic is coming from the link in your bio, your Stories, or a specific Instagram ad.
• Affiliates and influencers: e.g., how many purchases can be credited to a specific YouTuber’s product review?
• Email marketing: e.g., how many sales you recover at each step in your abandoned cart email sequence.

Why marketing analytics matter

Based on the tracking parameters (like? utm source=google) appended to the URL they clicked, you may trace the origins and behavior of visitors to your site in much greater detail using marketing campaign analytics.

Be precise about what is working (and isn't).

Marketing campaign statistics allow you to track sales from certain search engine keywords that you have bid on, as well as “sales from Google Ads.” not only “email clicks,” but clicks on a particular email link. visits through a link in your bio, not only “Instagram traffic.”

You may be as specific as you like.

Make wise investment choices by doing your research.

With the aid of marketing campaign analytics, you can categorize visitors to your website according to their origin, target demographic, content type, links clicked, and other factors. You can also combine visitors from different channels and landing pages that are part of the same campaign.

This enables you to evaluate and contrast the effectiveness of online marketing and the actions of particular visitor segments.

Take steps to achieve your business goals.

When you use analytics monitoring, you can zoom in on how certain investments, experiments, and techniques are doing before zooming out to make choices about budgeting, process improvement, and overall business strategy.

How to use marketing analytics to grow your shop

You have access to certain marketing metrics already. You may get information about your marketing in their analytics if you use Shopify, Google Analytics, or any other advertising or email marketing platform.

Understand which metrics to track

These measures, known as key performance indicators (KPIs), are important to you. Your business and overall marketing plan will determine the KPIs you employ. Marketing analytics will be seen differently by a software firm than by a shoe manufacturer.

For many ecommerce businesses, that might mean:

• Email opens
• Conversion rate
• Average order value
• Purchases from new customers
• Repeat purchases from existing customers

Ensure that the marketing data you are gathering is of good quality.

Never can data be completely accurate or pure. There are always openings and blind spots. However, by proactively employing tracking parameters to at least track your KPIs, you may improve the quality of your data sets.

Without campaign monitoring, your insights will stay limited, and without a reasonable traffic segmentation plan and methodology, your analytics may easily devolve into a disorganized jumble.

Even though you meant to aggregate all traffic from Instagram Stories together, your analytics will divide the traffic into two groups if, for instance, you use the parameter “utm medium=IGstories” in one Instagram Story link and then “utm medium=ig-stories” in another.

You should thus be very diligent in tracking your campaigns.

How to track campaign performance in Google Analytics

Before you continue, you’ll need to have Google Analytics set up and connected to your store.

Consider that you have lined up numerous bloggers to write paid product reviews for your launch. How could you keep track of every campaign to determine which was most and least successful so you could decide whether to pay for more sponsored posts in the future? Here's when link tracking—or the previously stated UTM Parameters—comes into play.

1. Set up your UTM parameters

Urchin Tracking Module, or UTM, is used to transmit contextual data about a certain URL.

The business Urchin, which eventually became Google Analytics, was purchased by Google in 2004. This is where the word Urchin originally came from.

UTM parameters are merely tidbits of data that may be appended to the end of any URL to provide Google with more information about that specific link.

UTM parameters may have shown in your browser's address bar, and you may have questioned what they meant.

Each UTM parameter defines a distinct aspect of the link's context, and a “&” separates each parameter in the text that follows the “?” Google Analytics for that specific website will read and record that parameter information when someone clicks on that link.

In Google Analytics, there are five UTM parameters that may be used to track different types of data; three of them are necessary, while the other two are optional. To learn more, let's examine each one in turn:

Required parameters

• Campaign source (utm_source): In most cases, this is used to describe the website or primary source where the link will be included. For instance, the URL of the website hosting your advertisements.

• Campaign medium (utm_medium): The term “medium” refers to the marketing activity. If you're using the link for a pay-per-click campaign, for instance, you may want to name this “PPC,” and if you're using the link to track traffic from a product review on a blogger's website, you might want to call it “review.”

• Campaign name (utm_campaign): The name of your campaign specifically speaks to your whole effort. For instance, it might be used to combine traffic from several sources and media in a single campaign and refer to a product launch, a summer promotion, or a specific discount.

Optional parameters

• Campaign term (utm_term): If you're managing a Google Ads campaign, you can track specific keywords using the campaign term.

• Campaign content (utm_content): If you're testing different versions of the same ad in a campaign to determine which one generates more traffic, this attribute might be useful.

2. Build your trackable URLs

Using Google's campaign URL builder tool to generate a trackable URL is all it takes to automatically track campaigns. Although you can manually add UTM parameters to any link, using this tool makes creating URLs with all the necessary information simple. Simply enter the URL you want to track along with the tracking settings to get started.

Google will provide you with your trackable URL once you have completed the campaign information. The appearance will be similar to this:

www.yoursite.com/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2022summersale

You may copy the URL and use it to start tracking a marketing campaign once you have it.

There isn't a wrong way to name your monitored URLs because the reports for the links are your own and only really need to make sense to you and your marketing teams.

There are certain recommendations to keep your reports organized and your attribution data simpler to analyze for insights, though:

• Decide on a naming convention in advance. Because each URL may have several parameters, unless you choose a consistent pattern up front for naming everything, things may get disorganized and hard to understand afterward.
• Don't write anything you wouldn't like your clients or rivals to read because everyone clicking on the link will be able to view the parameter's label.
• Case matters in parameters. Simply use lowercase letters by default and stay away from dashes and spaces if you want to keep things simple.
• Because these monitored URLs are typically lengthy, you may want to utilize a link shortener service like bit.ly to make them shorter if you're showing them publicly, such as in ad text or a social network bio.
• Create parameters only when they are required. Redundant settings simply serve to unnecessarily divide your visitors.
• Always use utm source and utm medium together. The traffic won't appear in your reports if you fail to include either one.
• The traffic from a link may still be given a default source and medium or it may be ascribed as generic direct traffic in the absence of UTM specifications.

3. View your campaign reports

Google Analytics will automatically track the clicks on the URLs you establish. All the parameters from each link will be recorded by Google Analytics (and other reporting and analytics solutions like Shopify Analytics) and presented to you in a convenient report.

Log into your Google Analytics account and select Acquisition reports from the menu on the left to get data about how your campaigns are doing.

From there, you can dive down into particular dimensions and UTMs, like campaigns or sources, and get a variety of traffic data.

If you have ecommerce tracking enabled in Google Analytics, you may track all sales resulting from digital marketing activity while seeing traffic aggregated into campaigns.

Like with any other source of traffic, you may see the data that matter to you most, such as sales, conversions, engagement rate, users, etc., to figure out which components are best for your campaigns.

4. Segment your data by demographics and actions

By selecting the Edit comparisons icon, you may also compare traffic segments that come from the same source, media, campaign, or other dimensions.

For instance, you may examine the relationship between overall campaign traffic and traffic that added items to the basket but did not complete a transaction.

Note: Only when the links are clicked will campaigns appear in your Google Analytics campaign reports.

5. Turn your data analysis into actionable insights

As you go further, you can discover that, depending on average engagement time, the campaign's abandoned carts were rather engaged, leading you to ponder what prevented them from making a purchase and whether you ought to test an abandoned cart sequence that is specific to the campaign.

What you do with the data you collect matters most

To make the most of your marketing efforts, analytics is a tool that may assist you to decide where to focus your attention and allocate your resources. But how you utilize it is ultimately up to you. In Google Analytics, reading and parsing data for insights can be challenging due to the ambiguity of data analysis, but marketing campaign analytics with a constant focus on data quality preservation make it simpler to read and understand.

Fortunately, Shopify also makes it simple to monitor the most crucial information for your online business. Get actionable, real-time data about your traffic, goods, customers, and more by diving into Shopify Analytics!

How to track marketing Analytics FAQ