Marketing tracking & ROI: Solving the mysteries

Article by
Amie Whale

Stop the guesswork. Discover how to keep track of marketing campaigns and calculate ROI, from analysis through to results for both online and offline marketing purposes.

In 2022, advertising expenditure in the UK hit £23.46 billion. But you know, the shocking thing is how many of these businesses don’t even track their marketing.

It’s like putting your money on a horse, throwing your slip in the bin and turning the TV off before knowing the outcome. The key to marketing success is to treat it as an asset to your business, not a necessary cost.

In this article, we help you solve your biggest marketing mysteries by showing you how to calculate your marketing return on investment (ROI), track campaigns and access the best tools.

Why is ROI important in marketing?

ROI is essential in any business’s marketing. It gives you the data and information to see whether campaigns are working or not. In gathering this data, you can allocate your budget more effectively and focus on areas of marketing that deliver the highest ROI.

However, despite the importance of ROI in marketing, nearly one-quarter of marketers are none the wiser. According to smallbusiness.co.uk, 23% of marketers don’t track their marketing campaign spend!

Marketing has become so prevalent in the modern world, that it’s perceived as a tick box exercise by many smaller businesses.

Yet, making your marketing work for your business can be the difference between making money and wasting it. Adequate marketing tracking also enables you to:

Find new insights into consumer behaviours
Stop or redirect unsuccessful campaigns
Focus on the campaigns that are performing well
Compare your conversion rate to see if your content is of high quality
Analyse your bounce rate to understand how to retain consumers

Although more businesses are now beginning to see the benefits of tracking their marketing, 37% say proving the value is difficult, with only 52% using analytics.

Analytics and marketing tracking tools give you the capability to turn your marketing into an investment that consistently fetches profits and engagement, not just some “potluck” necessary cost.

How to measure ROI on marketing spend

So, it’s all good knowing the importance of tracking and analysing your marketing ROI, but how do you do it? If you spend £100 on your marketing campaign and produce a £500 profit, you have made a £400 ROI, equating to an ROI of 400%.

Whether you’re using traditional or digital marketing, there are some clever ways to track how well your marketing is performing.

How to track online digital marketing

Conversion rate

Your conversion rate tells you how well your marketing is converting leads into consumers. It’s all good getting leads but making them customers is where it counts.

Your conversion rate is one of the most crucial metrics for measuring your marketing. A good standpoint would be 5%. If you’re much lower, don’t panic. The average is only 2%.

Seeing spikes or dips in your conversion rate says a lot about what content is appealing and what isn’t. Identifying the pieces resonating with your target audience as a basis for content should improve other areas of your campaigns that might be struggling.

Session Duration

The average session duration is a useful indicator of how your consumers behave and can shed some light on:

How long users are staying on your website
What pages your audience visits the most
How long your audience takes to purchase
If they’re finding your information useful
Whether they’re overwhelmed by your content

It would appear that the longer a user stays on your website, the better. But if your user spends substantial time on one page and then leaves, this might indicate they were confused or overwhelmed by the content and left.

Creating compelling content for your target audience will give you the best chance of generating sales and interest in your brand. So, don’t underestimate the importance of hiring an agency offering copywriting services.

Bounce Rate

The bounce rate metric tells you what percentage of visitors go onto your site, view one page and leave. If your bounce rate is high, then that’s a bad sign. The chances are it’s because the user experience is lacking with slow loading speeds, difficult navigation or poor quality of content.

In a perfect world, you want your bounce rate to be 0. But sadly, pigs can’t fly. Anything below 40% is considered a great place to be, with the average coming in at 40-50% for core website pages.

If the bounce rate on your homepage is high, you have a problem and should consider a redesign and rewrite. For other pages, think of ways of maintaining retention on your website. For example, include accessible links and CTA buttons to other pages to encourage your user sticks around.

How to track offline marketing campaigns

Granted, offline tracking is not as easy as online, but it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. So, here are a few ways to track offline marketing campaigns:

Call Tracking

Are you still using one phone number for your business? Then it’s time to invest in call tracking. It helps your business assign a unique phone number to your offline marketing material, be it a leaflet or a brochure for a specific event you can accurately track how many calls you have received to determine a real ROI. Take a look at Whats Converts, Invoca or Twillio.

Promo codes

A unique code unidentifiable anywhere else for offline marketing is a sure way to see what traction it’s getting. Whether on a poster or through digital signage, consumers will use the code for a discount on your products.

QR code

QR codes are helping to bridge the traditional and digital marketing worlds together. Scanning a QR code on an offline piece of marketing is another way of keeping track of your consumers’ behaviours and how well your offline marketing is performing. It will send your target audience to a digital landing page and ensure you can see where drop-offs occur.

Link shortener

Link shorteners can help consumers remember your website URL. Rather than having to remember the entire thing, you simply use a tool like Bitly to shorten your URL to something much more memorable.

Maintaining this URL shortener stays only on your offline marketing will allow you to see who visited the landing page from an offline source.

Customer forms

You probably recognise the “How did you hear about us?” question at the end of your customer journey. Well, this simple addition can tell you directly what element of marketing the consumer has engaged with.

Marketing tracking tools

Now you know what to track, it’s time to kit yourself up with the right marketing tracking tools. Here is a list of our favourites:

Google Analytics

Google Analytics accurately tracks and reports on website traffic. It has multiple features, including:

Campaign measurement
Website conversions and user activity
Audience reports flow visualisation
Custom reports

4,879,400 companies use Google Analytics as it’s considered the most accurate online tracking tool available. It’s an integral part of monitoring website behaviour. If you haven’t got it in place, read our handy guide.

Funnel

Funnel provides marketing analytics via a dashboard and reports cloud-based software. It enables you to:

Automatically collect data from separate marketing platforms
Track, analyse and run reports on various performance metrics
Create custom reports
Run campaigns in different countries simultaneously using a multi-market monitoring feature

Funnel is trusted by thousands of high-ranking data-driven companies, such as Skyscanner, Samsung, Adidas, and Superdry.

Agency Analytics

Designed for marketing agencies, Agency Analytics automates reporting while creating customisable dashboards and reports. It’s an easy way of accessing:

Automated reports and custom dashboards
SEO tools
Agency management
Over 60 integrations

Agency Analytics is trusted by over 5000 growing agencies, including us! If you want to find out more about using it, contact us today.

Aphrodite

Aphrodite creates clear data-driven insights as an emerging leader in plug-play analytics. It will:

Automatically adapt to setup and update every 15 minutes
Produce four dashboards, including ad account, conversions, engagement and opportunities
Deliver custom insights to optimise conversion rates

Aphrodite is a fast option that can integrate with e-commerce websites and provide clear ROI insights to make marketing more decisive and efficient.

Guarantee your ROI with marketing tracking

At eighty3creative, we focus on the ROI by helping our clients see marketing as an investment that keeps giving rather than a necessary cost.

At the end of the day, we want to see your digital marketing and website succeed. A higher ROI means we can all grow collectively.

If you need advice with tracking your marketing, get in touch with us today.