It’s been said that you can’t improve what you don’t measure. An important part of your marketing is regularly evaluating how your efforts are performing, what’s working and what isn’t it.

Having a better understanding of your marketing performance will also help in setting realistic goals.

As you start to create and publish content to drive web traffic and leads, the point is that your potential clients will be interested in that content. Otherwise you’ll hear crickets. Monitoring the interest your publishing efforts are producing is easy and will give you key information.

There are a wealth of tools you can utilize to see exactly how many people are finding and interacting with your website and your content. Some of them are available for free while others have a cost. Having this information is vital to ensure your marketing is taking your business in the right direction.

Some of the tools available free of charge

• Google analytics

• Keyword planner

• Google webmaster tools

• Facebook insights

• LinkedIn tools

You don’t really need anything more than these free tools to measure your results. But it can get a little cumbersome to navigate those analytics pages. If you are willing to spend a little money, there are paid tools that gather information from various sources into one report that will save you time. But the free ones will give you all the information you need to track your marketing performance.

These reports are like your profit and loss statements in accounting. They are not only helpful but also important. Just like with your accounting, you want to make sure your marketing is going in the right direction.

Ideally, you want to run your reports once per month, on the same day, so you have a set time frame for more accurate parameters.

What to track on the analytics reports

On your website

• Number of monthly visitors
• Bounce rate (number of people leaving your site right away)
• Number of visitors to each of your blog posts
• Where people came from ( traffic sources)
• Number of pages visited

On social media

• Posts exposure (how many people saw each of your posts)
• Clicks on the links
• Shares
• Likes

What else to include to your report

• Number of inquiries per month
• Number of unqualified vs qualified leads
• Number of conversions

The ultimate goal is to increase traffic and conversions. With these numbers, you’ll be able to determine what percent of visitors are taking action and contacting you, for example. Then you can work towards increasing that number. You’ll also be able to make adjustments to your content if you are getting too many unqualified leads. And so on.

Marketing analytics will enable your company to evolve its mix of tactics based on actual performance. They’ll help improve marketing ROI, and ultimately help you reach your business growth goals.

If you would like to find out where your business stands online, Action can provide you with a Marketing Assessment free of charge. There is no obligation of any kind. Find out how it works and what’s it includes here.