Today we are going to talk about how to track your marketing results and adjust your strategy. I share with you how I use a spreadsheet to track my website pageviews, social media numbers, email marketing open rates, clicks, and sales.
Tracking is one of the things I find to be of the utmost importance. It is a small but valuable task that will make a great difference in your business. I am kind of a geek when it comes to tracking. I like to use a spreadsheet. As a bonus to this episode, I am going to share a link in the show notes. You can give me your name and email address, and I will share with you the spreadsheet that I use to track my business. It is super simple, but I think that many times we overthink the simplest things in our business, so I will help take the guesswork out of it and show you how to do it with my spreadsheet.
We are going to talk about five things you can track in your business when it comes to tracking your marketing results and adjusting them.
The very first thing that you should track in your business is growth. I track the growth of my email list, my social media platform, and my podcast. Tracking is all about numbers. In order to know if you are missing the mark or if you are hitting your goals, you have to track numbers. Tracking numbers is the easiest way to see growth or the lack of growth in your business. It is super simple to study a spreadsheet by looking down through the different lines and columns to see if specific areas of your business are growing or not.
The second thing that you should track is traffic. If you have a website for your business, then you need to have Google Analytics installed on your website in order to see who is coming to your site. Google Analytics allows you to see the number of people coming to your website, how many pages they are viewing, what pages they are viewing, and what source they are using to get there.
This is very helpful because you may be spending a lot of time on social media, but most of your traffic may be coming from your emails or organically through Google searches. Knowing this will allow you to adjust your strategy to focus on the areas of traffic that are doing well for you. Google Analytics gives you a lot of little insights into how traffic is flowing to and through your site. Knowing these numbers is a valuable tool to help you know where you should spend your time.
The third thing that you want to track is sales. Are you getting sales, or are your marketing efforts not working? You may need to adjust your marketing efforts to something that will lead to sales. I don’t track sales on the spreadsheet that I am going to share with you. Sales are tracked in a different way. The way that you track sales is dependent on the type of business you have. For example, I track my sales through Honeybook and my bookkeeping software. No matter what your business is, you should have some way of tracking your sales. This way, you can not only make sure that you are making sales but also that you are increasing sales instead of losing them.
The fourth thing that you need to track are your email open rates and your click-through rates. If you have an email list, then you should be using an email marketing program. If you have been listening to my podcast for any length of time, you know that I usually recommend one of three email marketing programs that have the ability to track email open rates and click-through rates. Email click-throughs are links that are in your email. If they are clicking through those links to go to your website or wherever you’re sending them, you will be able to track that through one of these programs. The three I recommend are MailerLite, ConvertKit, and ActiveCampaign. This helps you see if the effort that you are putting into the emails is giving you the results that you are looking for.
The subject line is also something important to pay attention to. Some subject lines do better than others. If you make an interesting subject line, you’ll notice when you’re tracking. I am going to make a video to go along with the spreadsheet bonus I am giving you to show you how I am tracking all of these things. Email open rates are a percentage. If you have one hundred people on your list and ten people open it, that shows you that ten percent of your list opened that email. My open rates go up and down. Oftentimes, I will look and see that the open rate on a specific email was really high, so I check and see what the subject line was for that email. The subject line is generally what makes them open the email. You should always have a call to action. You can also track if the recipient is responding to your call to action. You can track whether they are responding to your call to action by tracking if they are clicking through to a link, to your Facebook group, to look up your book on Amazon, or replying to your email. This shows you if they are taking action.
The last thing is to reevaluate and adjust your marketing efforts. If you go back and look at your spreadsheet and your page groups are going up and you have tons of traffic coming from Instagram, then you know you need to continue doing what you are doing. If there is almost no traffic coming from Pinterest, but you are spending a ton of time there, maybe you need to spend more time on Instagram and less time on Pinterest. These are things that you can clearly see by tracking the numbers. You can use this to decide what it is that you need to do more of and what you need to pull back on. All of these things can be part of your marketing efforts, but you want to spend time on what works.
I want to invite you to take and use this spreadsheet and short video that I am sharing. I hope that you will let me know in a few months, after you have used it, how valuable it has been for you. Set a time each week when you will track your numbers. I sit down every Sunday, at some point, and open my spreadsheet and all of the places that I am tracking from, and I log those numbers into my spreadsheet. This helps me to see what my efforts are producing.
I did mention Google Analytics. Some people don’t know what Google Analytics is, so I will link to the episode that I did about Google Analytics. If you need help with Google Analytics, reach out to my team and me, and we can help you get that installed on your website for a small fee. That way, you can begin to track what is going on through your website and where the traffic is coming from. Click here to check out our services.
As promised on the podcast, you can download a copy of the spreadsheet here.
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I have a Facebook group for Christian authors, speakers, and coaches. It’s called The Christian Business Advantage, and each month I do a FREE training around the third Wednesday of each month. Please come join our group, and you will learn tips and tricks for your business.
