Tagging and tracking – just do it!

With more and more communication taking place across the social web, the need to find a means of measuring the value of all of the effort put in, increases. Every day, it seems, new tools are emerging that promise to help you measure your social influence. At the same time it seems there is still much wringing of hands whenever ROI (return on investment) is mentioned, because this holy grail of social measurement remains elusive.

In the midst of all of the hype and enthusiasm about quantifying social capital, it appears that some of the basic things that can be measured are being ignored. I guess this is because they are just not exciting enough and aren’t dressed up with fancy labels. However as dull as tagging and tracking can sound, these simple techniques actually provide useful information. What’s more some of the information gathered can actually be linked to business outcomes!

Of course I am making the assumption that your website is at the hub of your digital marketing efforts. If it is, then tagging the links you create that point to your website, and tracking a few basic activities that happen on your website, will provide a wealth of useful information to inform your future marketing efforts.

Tagging

Tags are additional fields of information that are appended to the URLs of focus pages on your website. You may have pages promoting particular services or that define your knowledge and expertise, they may be ‘landing’ pages already associated with a marketing campaign. Wherever you use any form of digital marketing, you will doubtless include a link back to your website, and hopefully to a very specific page within your website. Google AdWords automatically tags all of the traffic it sends to your website, so that you can evaluate it in Google Analytics, most other links you have should be tagged.

The easiest way to do this is to use Google’s URL Builder. Just input your website URL, and add some meaningful information to describe your campaign (name, medium etc.). Then all you need do is click on ‘generate url’ and you will end up with all additional tags added to your URL .

For example, if I run a campaign on Twitter to generate visits to my web-metrics page, I end up with a URL that looks like this:

http://wsiebusiness.co.uk/consulting/web-metrics/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=tweet&utm_campaign=promote_analytics. Pretty cumbersome I’m sure you will agree, and it doesn’t leave me much space to say anything in my Tweet. So I then use the Google URL Shortener and end up with this more manageable URL http://goo.gl/3FbES.

So wherever you post status updates via Twitter or directly to Facebook, Linkedin etc. and you want to include a link back to your website, then do tag it. Knowing where your traffic comes from is a valuable first step in determining how effective your campaigns are.

Tracking

Now that you can see where your visitors originate from, it is time to determine how you can encourage them to engage with you. Typically you will have a contact form on the site for enquires; some brochures or other documents to download; and maybe a newsletter signup. Everyone of these should be tracked. Contact forms and Newsletter sign ups should have goals defined that generate a thank you page which can be tracked in analytics. Document downloads should be captured using Event Tracking.

Using tagging and tracking in combination you can quickly determine which platforms yield best results for your marketing efforts, and optimise accordingly. For example it may be that Linkedin visitors are more likely to complete a contact form, and that Facebook visitors download most documents. To me this is a very valuable insight into the value of your social networking.

I constantly hear that social networking is time consuming, and know of many who ‘simply haven’t got the time’ to mess about with this tagging and tracking business. All I can say is that if you are investing the time and you have not got these basic measures in place, then that investment is a complete waste.

Let me know your thoughts. What other simple techniques do you use to make sure you are tracking that elusive ROI?

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