Three Important Data Trackers You Might Be Missing

How do you measure your success? In today’s world of digital media, everything is in a state of flux. One thing could be viral today and completely dead in the water tomorrow — there’s almost no way to predict it. But there are ways to track it. When you run a business, data trackers are essential pieces to define if your product, service, campaign, or initiative is running as planned. While everyone should be tracking how many conversions and sales they get, did you know that there’s more to data trackers than that?It’s true! You can measure the success of anything with these handy tools, including bounce rate, cost-per-action, return rate, organic traffic, interactions, and more! They’re essential to narrowing down what is working for you and what isn’t, so you can optimize your strategies down to a T. There are also so many for you to choose from!So where do you start? At Helix House, we use at least three different data trackers for all our clients. We wanted to share some of what we know with you. So, what are three important data trackers you might be missing?

1. Google Adwords

Google Adwords is the king of data trackers for Google ads. It is a free conversion tracking tool that shows you what happens after a lead interacts with your ads. This means you can track how they move through your website, right down to where they decided to make (or not make) a purchase. It sounds creepy to be able to follow someone’s process online, but it provides key information to you. If someone clicks on one of your ads and goes to the homepage, but doesn’t make a purchase, it could mean that it’s too difficult to find where to buy! Or, your website could be too overwhelming or underwhelming that it scares off the potential lead. Beyond that, Google Adwords can track web actions such as purchases and sign ups, calls made through the website, app installs and in-app actions, and so more.

Why Use Conversion Tracking?

Why would you want to use Google Adwords for conversion tracking? It’s simple. You can see what keywords, ads, ad groups, and campaigns are best at driving valuable customer activity. In other words, you see what works and what doesn’t in clear and easy to follow metrics.

2. Facebook Analytics

If you’re advertising on Facebook, you’ll have direct access to Facebook’s data tracker. In it, you’ll see graphs with top-level metrics that provide an overview of your campaign(s), such as:

• Actions on page
• Page views
• Page previews
• Page Likes
• Post reach
• Story reach
• Recommendations
• Post engagement
• Responsiveness
• Videos views
• Page followers
• Orders

All of these will show you how many people clicked, viewed, or interacted with your posts at the topmost level. You can go deeper than that too! For each post you’ve made, you can see what type of media you posted (text, photo, video), who it targeted (was it public, or to a specific audience), it’s reach (how many people saw it), and engagement (how many people clicked on it, commented, liked, and shared it). Facebook Analytics is one of the most in-depth trackers you can use for Facebook. Like Google Adwords, it is built to help you improve your campaigns so you can find out what works, and smooth out the rough edges on what doesn’t.

3. Call Tracking

Call tracking lets you see who is calling and where they got your number. At Helix House, we use CallRail, which uses dynamic number insertion (DNI) to allow us to track exactly where people are seeing your phone number. It works by giving every potential lead a different phone number based on where they are looking. For example, if you and a friend search for us at Helix House on Google, you may see one phone number, and your friend may see a different one. Don’t worry — they both will go to our office! It’s just a method we use to track where potential leads are coming from.

Why Use Call Tracking?

It may seem silly on the surface, but CallRail goes so much deeper than what we previously described. We also get to see the visitor’s session data, including how long they spent on the page with our DNI on it, if they submitted previous calls or forms, and what device they called on. There is also one more (not so) hidden gem CallRail offers: the ability to listen to phone calls. We get it — call tracking officially sounds even creepier than Google Adwords. However, the data a reputable salesman and/or advertising company get from these recordings is priceless. At Helix House, we use it to make sure we’re targeting the right audience for your service. For instance, say you’re running a suboxone clinic and someone calls you to help quit drinking. Listening to that call, you know you’re on the right track with targeting addiction services, but you’re still a little off with what type of addiction your ads are targeting. You can still get this information from the client, but CallRail and call tracking gives you a direct line to the information and a direct data path. You’ll be able to see the trends firsthand to know if it was a one-time anomaly, or a recurring thing. Information like this is invaluable for anyone who markets online.