Keeping track of your online marketing goals can become a confusing process, if you don’t have a clear understanding of how to track and measure your goals. There’s no need to be fumbling around in the dark — there are some awesome free digital analytics tools that make it easy to track your success.
In this post you’ll learn how to effectively use WordPress Stats, social media insights, and Google analytics to track and measure your digital marketing metrics. These three digital analytics tools can help measure website traffic, keep track of your social engagement, and measure your conversions and goals.
Digital Analytics Tools to Measure and Track Your Goals
WordPress Stats
If your website is built with WordPress, you can install a plugin called Jetpack that will allow you to connect to WordPress.com, and track site statistics such as visitor traffic and page/post views. You can access these statistics from the dashboard by hovering over Jetpack on the left menu, and clicking on Site Stats:
You’ll have the ability to view which posts are performing well, and your upward and downward trends in terms of views and viewers. Views are are tracked in terms of locations from around the world, and from online referrers such as Google Search, social media site referrals, web links etc.
You can also review your posting activity, tracking how many times you posted and when. Important stats such as the most popular day and time people visit your site will give you insight on the best times to post in the future.
Another metric measured is the number of times people clicked on links embedded in your site and in content. If you have affiliate referrals or other types of advertising on your site, you can use these metrics to track click-through rates.
WordPress also keeps track of your all-time posts, views, and visitors numbers so you have an idea of how many people have viewed your site since it launched.
WordPress stats are available to view on your desktop or on your smart device.
Social Media Insights
An oft missed opportunity to measure your social media engagement is using the digital analytics tools provided by your social media platforms.
Facebook Insights
Facebook offers detailed insights on your posting and promotional activities for business pages. You can find out what days and times your fans are online, what posts get the most engagement, how many likes your page gets, and the organic and paid reach of your posts, and page overall.
You can also boost your posts (paid promotion) directly from your analytics dashboard. Video metrics, and Shop analytics can be also be accessed from your Insights dashboard.
The following slideshow shows you how to access Facebook insights, and how to view the days/times you visitors are online.
Analyze Twitter Traffic
Twitter also gives you wonderfully detailed analytics and insights for your organic reach month by month.
To access your Twitter analytics, sign into your Twitter account on desktop and click on your profile icon top right. Click on Analytics.
In the analytics dashboard there are summary stats on numbers of followers, tweets, mentions, profile visits and tweets linking to you. You can also see your Top Tweet, Mention, Card Tweet, Media Tweet and more.
You can dig deeper from the home analytics page to find out specific data on each area. For instance, Clicking on View Tweet Activity for my Top Tweet in April gives me the following: Total impressions, engagements, likes, retweets, and media engagements (number of clicks on media in your tweet such as an image or video).
Overall analytics for each section can also be viewed. For instance, clicking on View Card Analytics will take me to the dashboard for Tweeted Cards for the last 28 days.
How do you use all this information?
With social media insights, you can recreate your successes by finding out what types of posts, tweets, cards and media drove the most engagement on your social media pages, and traffic back to your company website.
Either repost and retweet campaigns that were successful, or promote them via advertising. Create new campaigns with similar themes and content.
Also, repeat whatever actions you took to get your posts and tweets noticed — did you tweet a new blog post on certain days at certain times? Try the same, and see what happens. Don’t be afraid to experiment with new days and times, as well as with call to actions in your posts.
Tip: To keep track of days and times of your most popular posts, use a platform like Hootsuite or Buffer.
To make things easier, Twitter and Facebook, as well as other social media platforms that offer analytics, give you tips on what to do:
Digging into Promoted Tweets
A promoted tweet is similar to boosting a Facebook post. In promoted tweets, users can interact with the tweet just like any other tweet — it can be liked, retweeted or replied to.
For quick promotions, choose a popular tweet you’ve posted. At the bottom, click Activity >> Promote Your Tweet. In the popup window, choose a target location, a budget and confirm. To use advanced targeting, choose the link that says “ads.twitter.com.”
A promoted tweet should have a call to action — follow this link, check out this page, watch this video, promote a sale, offer a coupon etc. — and should include your best content.
By using a promoted tweet, your goal can range from drawing more traffic to your website, generating leads, or driving sales.
Once you select your target audience — Twitter users that will be the most likely to engage with your tweet — you can define your metrics for success.
You can measure the success of a promoted tweet in several ways: follower growth, (how many more followers you received as a result of the promoted tweet), impressions (how many users saw your tweet), engagement (how many users interacted with your tweet), and conversion (the number of users that followed through to sign up for your service or bought products).
All this can be viewed data by going to the Twitter Ads page, accessed under your profile icon.
Google Analytics
The third free digital marketing analytics tool you can use to measure goals and traffic is Google analytics, which tracks and reports website traffic data.
Using analytics, you can create and track goals and conversions from social media, email, shopping cart checkouts and other online campaigns that lead back to your Website.
To set up goals and tracking in Google Analytics, go to google.com/analytics and log in with your Google account. Go to the Admin panel, choose the correct property (your domain), and view. Click on Goals.
You can create a new goal, edit an existing one, or import a Google goals template.
If you choose a template, you may need to edit the goal.
For instance, in the below image, I chose a Contact Form template. In this type of goal tracking, most times a user is directed to a thank you page after signing up for a blog, or a free download.
To track this type of conversion process, you’ll need to edit the Goal Details and input the correct destination page URL.
As well, if a user must take several steps to get to the final destination page, you can track their progress with Funnels.
With Funnel tracking you can see where some users might abandon the conversion process. If many users stop at a certain step, this indicates there might be a problem with a certain landing page or form. You will want to inspect and do testing to see if you can improve the flow.
You can see in the image below how many users had products in their shopping carts and then as you funnel down, you can see how many actually made it to purchase the items in their carts.
While the conversion rate isn’t too bad, the owner of this online store might want to take a closer look at the step where the drop-off is steepest, from One Page Checkout to Cart to Purchase.
In Summary
By using these three free digital analytics tools, you’ll be able easily to track, measure and improve your digital marketing metrics.
What do you think? Do you have any questions or anything to add? Let me know in the comments section below.