Wait, wait, did I just said miserable? Ohh, I meant measurable …….

To monitor and evaluate your marketing efforts, it’s very valuable to be able to determine the traffic sources to your website. Let me share with you some techniques you can use to distinguish between different sources and campaigns. That’ll help you to determine the effectiveness and ROI of the different sources.

1. use Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a must start in your marketing efforts. If you haven’t done it already, create a GA account, and install the tracking code to your website (or ask your webmaster to do it for you). This enables you to see what is happening on your site. You’re able to see how much visitors your site attracts, where there’re located, and what the referrers to the site are. A wealth of information!
read more about GA here and here. Also check out this extended youtube channel.

2. Make all the links to your website traceable with a unique URL
Add medium, source and other campaign info to your hyperlinks. Create a high resulution campaign by tagging your links with specific information about your campagn.
Imagine you send out an e-mail newsletter to existing clients, and at the same time you sent a similar e-mail to new clients. With both the objective is getting people to sign up for your next event via a form located at http://youreventdomain.com/registration

Let’s get Analytics to work for us to determine the number of click through visitors from both campaigns: add some flavour to the url.

Compare these URLs

http://youreventdomain.com/registration/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter_new_clients &campaign=may_10_invite_event_initial_newsletter

http://youreventdomain.com/registration/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter_existing_clients &campaign=may_10_invite_event_initial_newsletter

In Google Analytics you can now differentiate the results between the new and existing clients.

Same with online campaigns, differentiate source (eventmagazinex and eventmagaziney, facebook, twitter), medium (social, display, paidsearch) and campaignname.

More on analytics tracking on slideshare

3. use QR codes with offline campaigns
There’s a lot to say about QR codes. Fact is that QR codes come in handy to add tracing codes. Add your enhanced URL to the code and off you go! Be aware that QR codes are scanned on mobile devices, so provide a mobile optimized page!!

4. use different landingpages for offline campaigns
If you run ads in offline magazines it is hard to determine the amount of traffic from those sources. Besides the QR code you can use dedicated landingpages to distinguish between the different magazines. For example use http://youreventdomain.com/magazinex and http://youreventdomain.com/magaziney

5. use Goals in Google Analytics to calculate succesratio
In Analytics there is a function called Goals. It enables you to track how succesful people are on your site performing certain tasks and helps you to calculate the successratio per campaign.
More information on how to set goals

6. track document downloads
Do you want to know how many times people download your eventguide or sponsorbooklet? Use a GA tracking code to establish that. And again you can calculate the results per campaign if you handled point 2 well.

Go ahead, gain insights about your campaigns. I bet you’ll be surprised, and you’ll have some amunition in the discussion with your client about the results of the marketing campaigns.