Hi there! Roost Web Strategies as a business has been around since 2020, but our team has been working in web design, development and promotion for over 20 years. A lot of things have changed since then, but there are some key things that have remained the same, and honestly, some of these fundamental things carry over from before there was an internet to do business on.
For example, the question “is all of this really worth it” goes WAY back! Measuring goals and trying to figure out the value of our time and money vs. the cost of our efforts, is something baked into our genetics, for thousands of years. When it comes to new ways of doing trade, the internet is another one of those places where we need to track the results of our efforts.
So, how do you tell if your online efforts are making a difference?
Tracking results used to be a lot simpler than it is today. Back in the day, we would post a sign out in front of our shop, and write on it something like – World’s Best Clam Chowder — we could try writing in white chalk one day and maybe a different color chalk the next day — and maybe we could tell a bit about how that change was working simply by counting the number of people that came in that day.
But when a business has an online presence, that opens up a thousand different doorways for customers to come through. Which message do we put by which door, and is it the right message? As you can imagine, this can be very complex, so we need to start with some fundamentals.
The first fundamental key: Set Goals!
What is the purpose of what you are doing or planning to do online?
As business people we tend to think a lot about business goals and efforts that lead directly to money. For example, say you want to see which ads or efforts lead directly to eCommerce sales. It’s very possible that your online efforts will lead directly to a sale. If you can track the sales, you can also track ROI – that is how much money you made because of a particular effort, minus how much the effort cost you.
With social media, more often you’ll want to look at engagement. These results might not be immediately trackable in dollars right now, but down the road they’ll lead to more money. For example, efforts that build brand awareness and recognition get your name and brand in front of potential customers and help differentiate you from your competitors.
Second Key: How do you measure performance of those goals?
You’ll want to determine what you’ll need to have in place to measure the success of your goal. Landing pages, tracking codes, statistics tools, and a plan to regularly review your progress are all important things to pay attention to.
Landing pages are a very good example of something that you should think ahead for. If you have an ad that asks people to do something really specific, like inquire about a special offer, sending that visitor to the home page may be confusing for them. A better alternative is sending them to a landing page on your website that is made specifically just for that one effort. A landing page helps keep your visitors focused on what you’re asking them to do, and it helps you to measure the engagements generated by that effort. Visits to that page are going to be really obvious in your statistics, that page will not be used for anything else, and you will create new pages for each new promotion.
Tracking codes and pixels are really common ways to track inbound and outbound links. These help analytics software to track performance of your efforts so that you can refer to them later. An example of a tracking code is by appending your website’s page URL with a query string. (Shown here: https://www.mywebsite.com/?UTM_SOURCE=GMB) The website address is appended with ?UTM_SOURCE=GMB so that when someone clicks on the Website button in Google My Business or Google Maps, it delivers them to the website with the tracking code (in this case, “GMB”, but can be changed for each link. E.g. Feb142020sale, SpringBreak, AnniversarySale, and so on. . . descriptive identifiers will be helpful when parsing the data later). Google Analytics tags each visit using that code so that you know how many inbound clicks came from people clicking on that specific link.
Statistics Tools – Almost every online profile that you have will have some way to tell you information like, how many visitors you’re getting, how many likes, shares, comments, followers, retweets that you’re getting. Find out where those are in your online profiles and learn how to read what they’re telling you.
Google Analytics, which is used for measuring website traffic. lets you track sales revenue, and cross that information with your ad and other campaign traffic, for ROI purposes. Google My Business and Google Maps also have profile statistics on specific posts and call tracking if you use those features. For Facebook, similar analytics information can currently be found on your business page Insights panel. Most social media sites have something very similar for statistics.
Schedule regular review of your statistics. Your tracking tools will help you determine the value of your efforts, so you don’t want to forget to look at them. A quarterly review of your statistics is a good target to try to hit, at least.
How do you know what success looks like?
A successful effort can look different, depending on what your goal and expectations were. The more you know about goals and tracking, the more realistic your expectations will be We’d recommend learning more about statistics, the tools that we talked about here, and also getting familiar with the lingo:
- Goals – We talked about these: these are things that you can measure and that should align with your business goals, but don’t have to be exactly the same as your business goals.
- Campaign – This is any effort that you take to promote your business, no matter what the goal is.
- ROI – Return on Investment. It can be measured in money, but doesn’t have to be, when you’re talking about online goals and efforts.
- Conversion funnels – These track the inbound flow of people from first interaction to first completed sale, or conversion. This helps you understand your customer’s journey.
- Call to action or CTA – People like to know what they’re supposed to do when they visit a website, see an ad, or even read a social post. What does that look like for your business?
- So many more! You will run into them as you go along — if you think about it, write them down somewhere!
Mastering goals and tracking is within the reach of everyone, but it can be very time consuming, and your time is worth a lot! So, if you are getting stuck on this stuff, then it’s probably time to find help. This is the kind of thing that Roost Web Strategies can help businesses with, so please don’t hesitate to reach out!
We have created a Hiring vs. DIYing calculator that can help you estimate how much money you might save by hiring a pro to help with your online presence and promotions.
If you have any questions or want to dive deeper, we are happy to do so! Just contact us!
