Is Your Internet Marketing Campaign Really Working?

What gets measured, gets done.

— Peter Drucker

You’ll hear a lot of marketers talk about metrics—and with good reason. Metrics make up the data we analyze to develop and improve our internet marketing campaigns. But metrics have zero meaning unless they serve a distinct purpose.

At GTMA, our purpose is to create successful campaigns that deliver qualified leads to our clients. Trackable events are how we measure the results. They shine a light on how we can continuously improve what we do as an ever-evolving company.

Why Are Trackable Events So Important?

If we’re investing our time and your money on strategic marketing campaigns, we need to track, measure and analyze our results to maximize ROI. The goal is to generate leads that convert into leases. However, we try to avoid using the term “conversions” when talking about the direct results of our marketing campaigns.

Since lead-to-lease conversions are in the realm of the on-site team, we’ll use the term “trackable events.” Think of an “event” as any user interaction with a website. Trackable events lead the user down the sales funnel to seal the deal with your on-site team. They are the meaningful steps along the journey from awareness and consideration to decision and action. We tag trackable events for analysis so we can make our campaigns more effective. Examples of trackable events include form submissions, outbound links, phone number clicks and email address clicks.

How To Track Events

So, what “events” does a user experience on your website? What trackable events tag a hot lead in the throng of countless casual googlers. If your web developer knows you’re using your site for marketing and doesn’t initiate a conversation about the trackable events you want built into your website, you’re probably working with the wrong developer. Even if you’re not a coding wizard yourself, there are some basics you should know when communicating your marketing strategy to your website developer.  

Form Submissions

Trackable form submissions can include contact forms, lease applications, newsletter signups, etc. The ideal method to track a form submission is to follow with a “Thank You” page to ensure the submission was completed successfully. Another way is to create a Google Analytics event that can be tracked.

The following should be clear enough for your web developer to recognize the tracking elements and add them to the existing button code:

In place of ‘label’, you would want to identify the form submitted with something like, ‘contact’ or ‘application’ or ‘newsletter’, etc.

Outbound Links

On most apartment community websites, the “Apply Now” button uses a different web address, which makes it technically an outbound link. The easiest way to begin tracking outbound links would be to include some Javascript at the page header of your site, separate from any other script:

Then, you would format your outbound links as follows:

Clicking the outbound link will now execute the Javascript and register the event with Google Analytics.

Phone Number Clicks

Although most mobile browsers convert phone numbers into clickable dialer links automatically, you can actually code the phone number as a hyperlink with Google Analytics tracking data:

In place of ‘label’, you would want to put something that indicates which phone number on the webpage was clicked like, ‘above nav’ or ‘footer’, etc.

Email Address Clicks

Email addresses are generally formatted as clickable links, but you can also code the links with Google Analytics tracking data:

In place of ‘label’, you might want to put something that indicates which email link on the page was clicked like, ‘schedule tour’ or ‘get in touch’, etc.

Tracking What Matters

So you see, all it takes is a few small, targeted changes to the code and your website becomes more than just a listing of your office hours and contact info—not so different from the old days of the phonebook. Trackable events make your site a lead generation tool by gathering important data.

We use data to make decisions about everything from social media messaging to advertising spend. Trackable events determine our benchmarks for success. It’s success you’ll reap the benefits of for the lifetime of your website.

Are you tracking what matters? Contact us to find out.