In order to become visible to potential customers on the Internet, companies sometimes invest considerable amounts of money in online marketing.
But how do they ensure that their efforts will pay off and reach their target audience? Are there more efficient ways to drive potential customers to your online store? And can you measure the success of your website even if you don't sell anything online?
To get answers to these questions, you should look into the topic of tracking, because it gives you information about user behavior on your website and much more.
We will explain what tracking is, how it works and how you can use it for your business.
Let's start with some terminology:
Tracking is an important measure of success in online marketing. The term comes from English (to track = to follow) and refers to the recording of user behavior. Data is collected, analyzed and used to analyze website traffic. In addition to insights into click behavior on the site, the results provide information about user sources, reach and goal achievement.
Simply put, it works like this: When a user visits your website, they leave a trail. When tracking, these traces are stored in HTTP headers, JavaScript or cookies. In order to evaluate this data, you need an analysis tool, such as Google Analytics.
Anyone who is responsible for a website, marketing, digital products and services, and who wants to increase the reach of the site should look into tracking.
It makes little sense to take marketing actions but never measure whether the desired goal is achieved. That would mean you are investing blindly. So different marketing areas need to be made measurable. You cannot expect complete transparency from tracking, but you can shed light on certain areas. First of all, it should be clear which important questions can be answered by tracking:
Tracking helps you determine
You can decide which budgets to invest in which marketing channels and which creative strategies work and which do not.
You should ask yourself Is there a source-specific user behavior that I should respond to as a site owner? Which traffic sources are good and which are not so good? How can I use creative ideas to attract more users from the "good sources" to my site?
Now that the benefits of tracking are clear, the question arises:
To interpret the "traces" left by your website visitors, you need an analysis tool. There are several, which we will discuss in more detail in another blog post. The most popular tool is Google Analytics. This is definitely sufficient for a first analysis of conversion rates.
In order to collect data with an analytics tool, developers need to install a small JavaScript snippet on the website. This can be done either directly by embedding it into the appropriate page templates or by using a tag management system. A tag management system is a kind of content management system for JavaScript. A free version is the "Google Tag Manager" provided by Google.
The tag manager automates the implementation, takes care of the technical part of tagging, and provides an overview of your code snippets by version. This may sound complicated, but in the end the Tag Manager makes your life easier. It means that marketers can use the data directly, without having to go through developers. However, marketers using the tag management system should have the necessary technical skills. Otherwise, a marketing intern could easily bring the site to a halt with just a few clicks.
To make it easier to distinguish which channels users are coming from (SEO, SEA, or Social), the data is aggregated as channels. Now you can compare user behavior on the site in terms of conversion rates, or compare two different segments: How do users move around the site (goal flow)? Do they enter on different landing pages (landing page report)? Do they fall out of the funnel at different points (e-commerce)? Et cetera.
Before you use tracking to monitor your success, it can't hurt to know how you get the data you need. First, a brief history of tracking tools:
Interestingly enough, they originated in the porn industry because they were among the first to see a direct increase in revenue from site traffic. Back then, analytics tools were simple hit counters that counted the number of page views. Popular sites had more "hits," or views, and were therefore more successful.
In addition to hit counters, there was also log file analysis. When a web page was displayed via web servers, data was recorded, so-called log files. However, these files were very large and slow to analyze.
Over time, more and more questions arose that were of interest to companies, and they wanted to know not only how often a page was accessed, but also, for example, how visitors moved around the page, and so on. Web analytics tools gradually became more complex.
Today, web analytics are usually implemented using JavaScript code embedded in a web page. This means that the measurement does not take place on the company's server, but on the user's computer. When a user visits your site, a 1-pixel image is loaded from the web analytics provider's server. This call is tagged with numerous parameters that provide information about the user, such as the browser used, the computer, the operating system, the IP address, the screen resolution, the IP address, or the website visited. Campaign parameters are typically added to the links to the landing page. This makes it clear which campaign your users came to your site from.
Now you have some basic knowledge about tracking and analyzing user data.
If you want to learn more about tracking tools, you should read our article "The modern tracking setup".
If you have now come to the conclusion that tracking would be a useful measure for your company, you can seek advice from an agency. We at W&S Digital Agency are happy to answer your questions about tracking. Just contact us at hello@wus.de.
