How to track Internet marketing social media Campaigns
Now that you are aware of the importance of using social media campaigns and article marketing for your Internet marketing plans you may wish to look further into the success of this additional work that you are doing.
So, you have took notice of the messages out there, that adding a Twitter account and a Facebook account for your company could be beneficial and you have started writing blogs and distributing articles across the Internet, but how do you track if this is actually benefiting your business?
There are various applications out there that offer these services some paid some free but here I am going to show you my favorites.
If you have a blog attached to your site that you write regular entries on you are probably already tweeting these on twitter and publishing them on your facebook page. Twitter in particular has its own analytical programme that will analyse the effectiveness of these tweets and look into what tweets generate interest and which don’t. This programme is called Hootsuite.
Hootsuite produces a dashboard which shows you simple statistics for your Twitter activity including visits, where in the world your visitors came from, how long they spent viewing and bounce rates. You can discover statistics on the gender and age of your Twitter visitors also which can be helpful for market research.
The difficulty grows however when you want to track articles and other campaigns you distribute across the Internet.
Using Google Analytics you can however track these campaigns also by using a certain little trick.
What you need to do is ensure that you have added a link into your article/ campaign that links back to a page in your website. When doing this kind of tracking you will need to take the landing page URL for your link and make some changes to it by going to the Google URL Builder tool.
Within this tool you are going to generate a fake URL that you can track. To do this you need to add the landing page URL into the first box in the builder. Fill in the required data in the form to ensure that you can identify the campaign.
Click to generate the URL and then use the one that you have created as the URL you enter as the link address in your article/ email marketing campaigns/ banners/ Facebook entries etc.
The result of this will be seen in your Google analytic report under page views. This is because although the URL you created isn’t a real page it is now a URL assigned to that site. The visitor will still go the the real landing page but the visit will now be recorded in the fake URL page which will help you to quantify the success of your individual articles and campaigns.
Its a really helpful tool that can help you to assess what extra work is worthwhile and which doesn’t work so much for your industry.
