When you spend your marketing dollars on an online campaign, you need to know whether or not it’s working. Otherwise, what’s the point?!
You have to be able to track what you’re doing. Period.
The good news is there are plenty of methods that allow you to track the behaviour of your site visitors so you can see which of your methods are most effective.
Read time: 5 minutes
Level: Expert
Skip to the section you're most interested in:
The trick is that these tools are built into the campaigns themselves, so you need to start with a vision of what type of data you want to collect. It seems a little complicated at first, but after reading this post, you’ll have a better understanding of what you should do.
What Online Campaigns Mean for Home Builders
Businesses solely focused on online sales have it easier. They can track whether a click from online advertising directly led to a customer’s purchase.
As a home builder, you’re playing more of a long game. Your online campaigns are designed to bring more visitors to your site. Once those visitors come to your site, you want to convert them into leads by having them sign up for your mailing list.
Your leads turn into sales after they’ve studied your information, visited your homes, and talked to your Area Managers.
After all of that, it’s hard to say whether your online campaign is working, isn’t it?
One way you can determine the effect on your bottom line is to calculate the value of a lead. There are two ways to do this:
- Value of Sale / Number of Leads
- Average Sale x Lead Conversion Rate (lead conversion rate percentage is Leads Generated / Website Traffic x 100)
As a home builder, #2 is the one you want to use.
When you have your Lead Value, it’s easy to see how more leads equals more money.
So let’s start getting you those leads.
What Should You Track?
There are a lot of metrics to look at depending on how detailed you want to get with your tracking. Let’s cover a few important ones as they relate to helping you sell more homes.
First, you’ll want to get a good idea of the monthly traffic your website brings and see what you can do to increase it. It’s a numbers game, after all, so the more traffic your site has, means more opportunities for converting them into leads, and in turn, more home sales.
It’s time to take those numbers a step further and look at the individual pages on your site. Which ones are performing the best? Are they staying on the page long enough to read what’s on it? Track the bounce rate to see how many people are clicking, realizing it is not the information they need, then exiting right away.
Then look at the time visitors spend on each page. A higher number means they’re spending the time to read it and it’s interesting to them. This type of traffic tracking is very easy to monitor, especially with a complete marketing automation program like HubSpot.
You also want to track how often those site visitors are converting into leads by signing up for your mailing list or other offers and information. And once people are on your mailing list, you’ll want to see who is opening up your emails and which links they are clicking.
See, it all ties together ;)
More importantly, you need to track which particular online campaigns are most effective. For instance, let’s say that you have five different downloadable guides focused on a particular type of customer need. If one of those guides is generating 75 percent of your mailing list sign-ups, then it’s a clear indication this is an area to focus your attention on.
Similarly, if you notice that traffic coming to your site after searching for a particular keyword is more likely to sign up, that’s a good keyword to focus on.
Methods for Tracking Online Campaigns
There are two primary methods we use for tracking: UTM codes and tracking pixels.
UTM Codes
UTM codes are best when you want to track which of your campaigns are bringing traffic to your site. They’re bits of code that are added to the end of a URL and show what a person clicked on just before coming to your site.
For instance, it could help you see which of your Google AdWords keywords are bringing in the most traffic. You may want to shift your money to those words. Additionally, if you’re guest posting on other sites, the UTM code can show you exactly where that traffic is coming from.
Pixels
Tracking pixels, on the other hand, are used to track user behaviour on the site. Essentially, it’s a small, unnoticeable pixel on a web page. If it displays, you know that the user was there.
Placing these on your pages can show you whether or not someone signs up for your mailing list and whether they’re clicking through to read additional content on your site.
Using Data to Refine Your Advertising
There’s no point in gathering all of this data if you’re not going to use it! That’s the whole point of tracking your marketing campaigns.
It’s all about the marketing analytics.
Make sure you’re intentional about the type of data you’re gathering, and are using said data to see if you’re meeting your goals. With that data, you can make adjustments to your campaigns. If one thing works better than another, focus your efforts on that, but test that effective method against a new method to see if the new method might be even better.
Tracking your online campaigns is tricky if you don’t know what you’re doing. That’s why you need a strong marketing partner like Marketing Ninjas. We can help you design campaigns that will help you achieve the traffic, leads, and sales goals you set out for your home building business.
Originally published July 21, 2020
