Knowing what makes you money and what doesn’t is arguably the most important thing for a digital marketer to know about your business. But, how do we know which ads, keywords, landing pages, audiences or products actually led to real sales or leads for you?

It’s not guesswork - at least not for us. We use various tools and techniques to ensure that users are tracked from the moment they interact with one of our links (such as in an ad) to the moment they convert or leave your website.

What can digital marketing agencies track?

We can generally track anything, provided your website is set up in a ‘friendly’ way and that the data we collect is appropriately anonymous and used appropriately.

This means tracking when someone fills out a form is easy, but tracking that Steve from Napier filled out that form is unethical and probably illegal.

To help you know what kind of things we would typically look to measure, here are some common ones.

Form submissions, button clicks or leads.

For most non-ecommerce websites we ensure that all relevant actions that could either be a lead or be a prerequisite to one. Usually this is a contact us form on your website where we aim to track when someone submits the form.

We can also track when people click a button or link, such as an add to cart button or a call to action. Or often we will track when people click on an email or telephone link as this is likely the final step a user would take before calling or emailing you.

Ecommerce revenue, sales & transactions.

Ecommerce tracking is a beast in itself, but in a nutshell, we track all the relevant ecommerce actions that take place on your website. When people view products, add them to their cart and ultimately purchase a product. We measure the value of the products and usually product data alongside this such as SKU ID, brand and category. We keep track of all revenue, transactions, AOV, conversion rates and other relevant metrics.

In some cases we are also able to measure things like cost of goods sold, profit and customer lifetime value as well.

Anonymised audience data.

We can’t keep track of personally identifiable information, such as names or phone numbers associated with an individual. However, this data when aggregated and anonymised is perfectly fine and ultimately more useful.

We know the ages and genders of most of your website users, as well as their locations, interests, estimated household incomes and more. Sometimes this data is useful, sometimes it isn’t, but it’s always there by default.

Other website actions

We aim to track any relevant action taken by all users on your website. Google Analytics measures loads of such things by default or with some slight tweaks, such as whether people visited your website, how far they scrolled, how many pages they viewed, what products they were interested in and much more.

One useful example is for remarketing, where we can track certain pages or sets of pages (such as categories) that people visited and serve hyper-relevant ads back to them. This is most commonly used for ecommerce websites when a user views a product and we show them ads for these products later as they browse the internet.

What do we use this data for?

1. Measurement

The most important thing to do in digital marketing is to track the actions that make money for your business. We always ensure leads and ecommerce revenue are tracked for our clients and attributed back to the clicks that captured these customers in the first place.

This enables us to know which ads led to sales or which keywords resulted in new leads. In the end, it enables us to know what works and what doesn’t, and to adjust our tactics and strategies according to this information.

It also enables our paid media platforms, such as Google and Facebook, to adjust the bids to maximise the results for you. This sounds complicated, but these conversions are the signals that tell Google to pay more for a click on keyword A versus keyword B.

2. Targeting & optimisation

Secondly, we can use this data to target different people or to serve different ads to people. Remarketing is one example, where we serve ads to people with products that they previously viewed.

We also optimise and adjust our ads accounts based on this data, including things like location, age or gender - but usually this is handled by the AI bid strategies.

How we track these actions on your website

This is the part where this guide could get technical real fast so we’ll spare you all the details - we’ll probably get more into this in subsequent blog posts.

The first thing we do is ensure all relevant tags are placed on the right places of your website. A tag is a small snippet of code that passes data from your website back to various other platforms (more on these below).

Now, as your marketing software stack grows you could have a need for a substantial number of tags on your website. Tag management platforms were invented to help marketers manage these tags without the help of a developer.

Google Tag Manager is the market-leading tag management platform in the world and is what we and most digital marketers use. You’ll place one piece of code across your website (or for apps, DesignRush has a list of agencies that can help with this) then we will be able to insert the rest of the tags throughout your website using the Google Tag Manager UI - typically no further need for a developer.

Within Google Tag Manager, we can set these tags (remember snippets of code) to be run only when specific actions occur on your website. This could be when someone makes a purchase, submits a form or simply views a page.

An example is an ecommerce tag that is set to run only on your Order Confirmation page. This tag will send information about the purchase, including the dollar value, back to the various platforms that require it.

What platforms do we use?

Here is a list to the platforms we most commonly use for tracking and measuring performance, however, not that the list is non-exhaustive.

Google Tag Manager - The most widely-adopted tag management platform in the world.

Google Analytics - The main website analytics platform that offers reports on everything a user does on your website.

Looker Studio - This is a dashboarding and data visualisation tool that is typically used for reporting and data analysis.

Meta Event Manager - Facebook’s website tracking tool that houses the Facebook Pixel. When set up correctly, we can use this to pass website data back to Facebook for optimisation and measurement.

Google Ads - We can track user actions and data and report back to the work that is being done in Google Ads.

Shopify - Shopify is particularly helpful as it has some fairly straightforward features that enable easy integration for tracking ecommerce (typically very difficult) data and passing it to Google Analytics.