In this live Convirza webinar with Dan McGaw, CEO of Effin Amazing, we will take a look at how one tracking trick has helped him prove the ROI of every campaign he works on.
During this 30 minute presentation, you’ll learn:
– How to set yourself up for success with precise ROI tracking.
– What tools you need to track your most vital metrics.
– What this ONE tracking trick can do for you and how to implement it quickly.
– How to prove ROI for the campaign you just ran and back it up with data.
– How to use your data to optimize your campaigns and increase ROI.
Daniel: As a digital marketer, you’re running 20 different channels. You have email, you have PPC, you’re doing some retargeting on Facebook. You’re possibly also spending money on SEO, and you have all these different things you have to try to put some sort of value to. What makes this even worse is that there is just too many tools to track them with.
And it’s really, really hard to pick out an analytics tool when you’re not a technology guru. And making sure that you can measure your marketing efforts, sometimes doesn’t work in specific analytics tools. So you have to use different tools to measure specific channels. Now, I hope at the end of the day, everybody here has Google Analytics. I mean, if you don’t have Google Analytics, I think there’s a different discussion we should be having, because Google Analytics is the Holy Grail of analytics online.
So definitely make sure that you have GA set up on your site. Now, I have the opportunity to work in SaaS a lot. So a lot of times, we’re using Kissmetrics. Kissmetrics is a user identifiable platform, and it tracks people over the lifelong journey, whether with your product or service. So we use that because it builds a customer database. Not saying you have to, but I’m just saying it’s a really good tool to be able to track lifetime value to SaaS. So the examples I use today will be with Kissmetrics in Google Analytics to give you a better understanding.
Now what matters though is that, it doesn’t matter what channel you’re using, you have to be able to prove ROI. Even with these hurdles of different types of analytics tools and different channels, everybody that is out there doing marketing right now in the digital space has to prove ROI for blog management right now. People who are doing social media, every day it’s becoming more and more complicated, and you have to prove your return on investment.
I mean, I think email marketing is one of the better channels allowing you to capture the return on investment that you put into it. But this is once again another channel that is a hurdle of getting the return on investment numbers back. And then of course the last one is going to be your pay per click. This is really, really important. If you are spending money, you must be making sure that you’re getting a complete return on investment back, if not getting exponentials off of those numbers.
So with all those hurdles, you and your team still have to make sure that they’re actually able to track this information. Now what I want to do is tell you about the one tracking trick that we use that rules all of these tools. It works in every single channel you can do, and it’s also going to work on almost every single analytics tool you can use as well. And it’s really simple. All channels and all analytic tools work with UTMs. Now, UTMs are a very simple standard that was created online that allow people for tracking.
Now what a UTM is is an Urchin Tracking Module. For those of you out there that have been around in the industry for some time, Urchin was what Google Analytics was before Google bought it. It was Urchin Analytics. Now Urchin had came out with a way to add these tags to the end of a URL so you can track where that URL was, as well as track any campaign information along with it. Now we can see of course, we have a small example of our website which is effinamazing.com, and then we can see all these random codes behind it. Let’s break that down just a little bit so you can get a better understanding of which each one of these mean. Now at the first one, we’re going to notice that we have the URL. We have to have the URL, if we’re sharing this is on LinkedIn, what we’re going to want to do is make sure we have it linked back to our site. It’s pretty self-explanatory.
If you’re sending out an email, you want to make sure that you have those linked, that drives them to whatever property that you’re looking them to go to. Now next, you’re going to want to make sure that you have a campaign source. You’ll notice that we have UTM_source on top. And then of course, that campaign source was actually assigned to Google. And I’ll go into campaign source in just a little more detail after we walk through how this UTM works. Now next you’ll notice that we have the UTM as medium CPC, which stands for cost per click. Next, you’re going to notice in there, we have UTM campaign, and this one is going to be focused on the product. Next is going to be campaign term which is actually a non-required field but really, really helpful. And then what we’re going to do is jump into the campaign source. Now, when you have a UTM source, a campaign source, this is going to be the source that the link came from.
So for an example, if I was doing Google AdWords, the UTM source potentially would be Google. Now, if I was posting a link on Facebook, Facebook would be the source. Now, if I was sending an email out, let’s say, I was sending out a newsletter through mail chimp, mail chimp would now become our source. So the source is going to be the original source at which people found that URL and then direct it back to your site. Now the next one is going to be the medium. Now a medium is very simple to understand.
This is going to be the medium in which they got to us. So if they had clicked on a PPC ad, we may say CPC or PPC. We may also just say paid acquisition. Now, if somebody was of course clicking on a banner ad, we would put “Banner Ad.” If somebody was clicking on a Facebook post, we would potentially write “Post” as the medium because they clicked on a post to be able to get to our site. There’s a lot of different ones, right”? So for even email, you have an email, the original source was Mail Chimp, but the way that the message got there was the email. So that is definitely going to be the medium in that example.
Now, next one is going to be the UTM campaign. Now the campaign is very important because in the hierarchy of the way these work in analytics, the campaign is typically at the top of the hierarchy. So things ends up raveling underneath of it. So in this one, this UTM campaign [inaudible 00:05:18] this was actually a link that was left inside of our product to [inaudible 00:05:23] else. Now there’s other ways that you can look at this [inaudible 00:05:33]. Say you’re running a 10% off weekend sale, well the campaign is probably going to be that long. All of those different back into the campaign and you can start to prove ROI [inaudible 00:05:48] such as content. In this example, of course, one of the ads that we were looking to was to Kissmetrics.
So what you’ll notice is of course, we want to be able to focus in on a content. Now some people use content for their A and B testing as well. So if you’re running…you’ll notice we have content A and we have content B. Some people are using these types of links in their marketing so they can measure the revenue that’s given off of an A/B test in an email, an A/B test on a landing page, lots of different ways to look at it. Now, the last one is actually one of my personal favorites which is UTM term.
Now in a lot of situations, UTM term is going to be what you use for your keyword. And for the folks in this call who are actually using AdWords, all you have to do is put a curly bracket, the word “keyword” and another curly bracket, and it will actually assign the keyword to [inaudible 00:06:37] and give you dynamic keywording. And that will allow you to really understand what keywords are working. But if you were to use this in an email, let’s say that you had an email that was being sent out on a newsletter that every one of those links on the newsletter were directing people back to the same place.
What I would potentially do is change each one of those UTM terms to the word that the person clicked on. So that way, I can better identify what keywords were people clicking on in that email or which sections of that email were people clicking on. Now one thing I want to make sure that we’re all on the same page with is that if you’re not measuring it, really what’s the point of even doing it? In this day of age with digital marketing is that if you don’t have some sort of analytics platform set up, if you don’t have some sort of tracking system set up, why do it? Because you can’t measure whether it was successful, you can’t measure whether it failed. If all of your efforts go to failures, and you don’t know that, then you’re simply wasting everybody’s time.
So if you’re not measuring it, what’s the point of even doing it? Now, we’ve gone over the way that you can obviously think about a UTM. UTM source is going to be the place that it came from, the medium is going to be the means at which it got you. And of course, we have term, contents, and campaign. But how do you build these, right? Now, the most common one is going to be on Google. So Google Analytics and Google have a Google Analytics URL Builder. So if you just went to Google right now, typed in “UTM Builder,” you would get Google as your first result. Go check it out, really, really easy. Here’s an example of what it would look like on my screen. It’s going to be really simple, it’s going to have the website’s URL, you’re also going to have your campaign source, your campaign medium, so along that.
Now, this makes it super easy, but the only problem with that is you don’t really get to store the information, right? You want to track your UTMs overtime because you’re going to forget what it means in six months or a year from now, and you’re always going to want something to refer back to, to make sure that you understand what that UTM was. I’m not going to remember in nine months one link I created for Facebook. But if I wrote it down, I would have the opportunity. Now, there’s a really cool way to do this, and that’s just to keep a log of your UTMs. This is going to be an example of a Google Spreadsheet that we have built here which allows us to store the UTMs and as well as build the [inaudible 00:08:50] URL. You’ll notice off to the left hand side, we have DM for Dan McGaw as the creator. I have notes in it so that way people know where to do it.
And then we’re able to fill in the campaign source, name, medium. Now, if you want access to this spreadsheet, I can send this to you. Just shoot me over a tweet, and it’s @DanielMcGaw. But what this also does for you is it builds the entire URL. The URL is going to be built based upon a formula. So that way, once you’re done filling out all this information, you simply copy and paste and put that link wherever you want. Now last, we’ve actually built a tool that makes building UTMs even faster, which fits right into your Chrome browser. If you’re not on Chrome, please download Chrome, check it out. You’ll be able to get the Chrome extension. But what it does is just makes it nice and easy to build these inside of your browser.
So we’ll pull in the URL from the page, as well as we’ll mention the campaign, medium, and source, and then of course, you can copy that immediately. And we also make it so that you could save to a Google Sheet if you wanted to. But either way, just let me know if you have any questions about the UTM Spreadsheet and I can send that over as well. Now, another thing that we see people do with UTMs is they don’t tend to share them on social media when they’re really, really long links.
What they tend to do is shorten them. So, you’ll see a lot of companies use Bitly which will shorten the URL before they put it on Twitter so it will fit in the tweet. But other people do it on Pinterest and Facebook, just so that way you don’t see all the crazy code of how you’re following people. And this is a really common practice.
So definitely check out Bitly, you’ll be able to drop your URLs in there, they’ll shorten them out, they’ll be nice and little, and as well as it makes it so it just doesn’t look like you’re tracking people all over the web, which is really, really nice. Now that we’ve gone over what is a UTM and how can you make them, let’s jump into a couple of examples that are going to help you get started in building UTMs to track your return on investment.
The first example that I want to talk about though is blog management because this is really important. We do a lot of content marketing here at our company, and we focus on getting a return on investment from every bit of content we do. Now, one of the things that happens with blog management, you’re like, “Well, how do I really measure how much money is spent? Susan’s been writing that blog post for like a couple of days and how do I measure that?” Well, it’s actually really simple. All you have to do is start using time tracking.
And it actually sounds kind of funny that people don’t use this to better understand where their time is going. Every single employee at our company, we might be an agency that obviously does do consulting, but we actually don’t do billable hours here. We only work with people based upon our retainer. But yet, everybody in our company tracks the exact time that they spend on almost every single task, and it’s all tracked through Harvest.
This webinar right now, I’m running a timer in the background that is tracking the amount of time that went into this so I can effectively measure the return on investment. Now, you could do this same process whenever you’re creating a blog post. So at least start tracking the time that you’re doing while writing it. And as most people would understand, this webinar starts as a blog post, and I wrote that blog post and tracked all of my time to make sure I knew exactly how much money we were investing into all of this.
Now you can do this very simply as well, and it’s not very complicated. Once you track the time, all of that will go directly into your project management pool, excuse me, into your [inaudible 00:12:11]. Spending $3,000 or $5,000 worth of content to land one client makes a lot of sense for us. Now even though I track my time that way, I track my time all the way through this, and I wanted to make sure that I could get every bit of detail I could after that happened. So even for the email that I sent out to my email list today, there was a tracking URL that was on all of those emails that then of course landed on the landing page to sign up for this. And we’ll be able to of course get that information later, and then better start to understand where is our investment going, and then how much did we get in return.
Now, just to keep moving on, you need to be tracking your content marketing as a big point. I also want to show you where you can find this information in your analytics tools. Now, for everybody out there, if you don’t have Google Analytics, we have a problem. So I’m hoping everybody does. Now, if you open up your Google Analytics account, you’ll notice on the left hand side you’re going to have acquisition, that’s number one. You’re then going to want to go down to the All Campaigns, which is number two, and then you’ll notice that you have your primary dimensions, which is going to be number three.
And you can actually click on each one of these and see how they change between all the different stuff that you have. Now, if you were to just take on the [inaudible 00:15:53] report, let’s say that you have revenue tracking, what you’ll notice off to the left hand side is we have our campaign names. As I was telling you, campaign names are the hierarchy, the highest part of the hierarchy to measuring.
So you’re going to want to make sure that you have a perfect campaign name which is set up across all of the different things you’ll be using to promote that campaign. So for an example, this campaign that I’m on right now is called ROI-UTM that is the overarching campaign. You’ll be able to see the number of sessions that have come to your site because of that specific campaign. But you’ll also be able to measure all of the actions that those people took so you could do better analyzation and improve your conversion rates.
So we can see the total number of new sessions, total number of new users, our bounce rate, pages per session, all of the vanity metrics. Now for my business, we only care about revenue. The rest of this stuff does not matter that much. We can see transactions and we can see revenue. Now what you’ll notice is of course we can see which one of these campaigns are driving the highest amount of revenue.
And if we’re tracking how much time and investment went into each one of these items, what we’ll be able to do is compare the two numbers and now be able to see the exact return on investment. Well notice this campaign down here had potentially a lower amount of revenue, but it might have a higher amount of revenue per person that’s coming through. The conversion rate might actually be better. So it’s very, very important to do analysis of all of this so we can better understand things.
And as we can see, these two campaigns even though they might have been less money, they had a higher e-commerce conversion rate. And this is the exact reason why you want to invest in making sure you use UTMs. Because that single UTM that was used on all of those links for this campaign, we were able to identify that we should be readjusting our efforts to of course convert with this campaign if we’re making more money. So really, really simple. Now let’s just fill this out again.
Once again it is the money made subtracted by the money spent. If you’re not making more money, then you are spending, you have a problem. And if you cannot tell that you’re making less money than you’re spending, how are you going to fix the problem? So you need to make sure that you’re using some sort of analytics tool and some sort of UTM tracking to make sure that you can get the full picture. Now let’s use an example for email marketing, and I really enjoy this company.
TaskRabbit, if you haven’t heard of them, check it out. You can simply just open up the app and say, “Hey, listen, I need somebody to go to the store and fetch me a jug of milk, and I’ll pay $15 for it.” And if they’re in your area, you will get somebody who will go fetch you a gallon of milk for $15. Like it totally works. Sometimes you’re in a need, you need to do it. Now whenever they send out an email, they obviously want to measure the impact. And what we can see on this pretty email, we have a logo, a picture, the summer savings, “$50 off,” and then, “Find help now.” A major call to action.
Now, if they were going to be focusing on what UTMs they need to do, they’re driving people back to the site. So of course, the URL at the top is going to be TaskRabbit. The source, where they sent the email from is campaign moderate because that’s what they use for their email. You also notice we have the medium, which is email, as I said that is the way the message got to you. This is also the Summer Savings Campaign.
So what we’ll be able to identify is that Summer Savings is the campaign because this could be used across not only the email but the advertisement. Maybe they have pop ups on the websites, maybe they have an affiliate program, but the campaign would be the same across all those. And then lastly would be the UTM content, because this potentially was part of an A/B test. So potentially another email was sent out just like this except for instead of it saying, “Find help now,” it said, “Get help now.”
So we want to make sure that we’re tracking all of these different variations to give us the most amount of return. Now, after this email goes out, what we can do is immediately turn to our analytics tool and begin to track how these UTMs act in our funnel. We’ll notice off to the bottom left hand side, we have the campaign name, and we have multiple different campaigns which would be running, and we can see how each one of those interacted with the funnel.
As we can see that there might have been more volume for the Ten Off, but the referral offer actually had a lower conversion rate as well. And as well as if we look all the way down the funnel though, towards purchase, this had a higher purchase rate. So we’re less interested in people viewing our products. We’re more interested in people purchasing our products. So even though this had bigger volume, this had a bigger conversion.
So by using these UTMs, I now better understand I should possibly look at spending more of my time, more of my money, and more of my effort on the referral offer rather than the $10 off because my conversion rate is better, which means I’ll get a larger return on investment. So pretty simple, pretty straight forward. If you need help trying to understand using your analytics tools, once again, hit me up on Twitter, more than glad to help you out. Now, as I was showing you earlier, you can use the Google URL Builder which is found online. Just Google “UTM Builder,” you’ll find the Google one. You’ll notice on the left hand side, we have campaign medium. That is exactly how it’s going to appear in your analytics. And a common area where we see people make mistakes is that they end up making the word Banner one time capital, another time they accidently put lowercase B.
Next time they only put one N instead of two Ns. What’s really important is that these are going to show up the exact same way, case sensitive, from the form builder, the way that they’re going to show up into your analytics. You want to make sure that they match exactly. Because if you have multiple people saving UTMs and you’re all saving them somewhat differently, nobody is going to be able to run efficient metrics on how you’re generating return.
Now let’s talk about our last example. Okay? And this is probably one of the most important ones, PPC. Now, pay per click is really, really important to track because obviously you’re spending money. If you’re spending $10,000 a month and you’re making $5000 in return, that is not a good equation, you’re losing $5000, and nobody wants to lose $5000. So you want to make sure that you have UTM set up so you can also track which keywords are profitable, which ad groups are even profitable.
Or isn’t the fact that Google AdWords is profitable compared to Bing, and for all of you out there doing paid acquisition, Bing is super cheap right now. Go check out Bing, it provides amazing returns. Not as big of a network, but it still has great volume. So for an example, if this was for GNC.com, we would have their URL, we’d probably put the UTM source as AdWords if we were using AdWords. Now, once again, if you’re using Bing, you probably want to put Bing on there as the source, because it’s a different source.
Now the medium is PPC. You can consider AdWords PPC, and you also can consider Bing a PPC. So that’s something where the medium would be potentially the same. But the source would be different which would give us better analysis on each network if we want to do further digging. Now of course, this campaign is the Summer Savings. And then lastly, we have the UTM term with curly bracket keyword “curly bracket.”
Now that’s really important because if you set that up correctly in AdWords, you’ll be able to see the profitability of each individual keyword which is very, very important. Now, what we’ll notice on this page is this is going to be a revenue report which I’ve ran in the analytics. On the left hand side, we’re able to see direct, paid, email, social, content, organic, then as well, understand the direct total value that came in from that, total revenue, average revenue per person, the lifetime value, how many paying customers, and then even our return. Since we’re effectively tracking all of our different channels and especially tracking our paid, what we’re able to do is find out that we’re making an average of $430 on these people.
Now this is really good. But we’ll also notice that we have a fair amount of churn from those channels, and this is why it’s very, very important to make sure that you’re using UTM in your tracking. Because if we’re able to isolate all of our emails and see how that impacts churn or impacts our lifetime value, what we can see is that we potentially are leaving $110 on the table if we focus our effort on email when we should be focusing our effort on the paid acquisition. Now, if we really wanted to focus any of our efforts, we would try to increase our direct, but increasing directs can be a little bit more difficult than you might think. I mean a lot of that has to do with brand recognition and other different things where people can’t click through.
So definitely really, really important because we’d like to have lifetime value. Now what I want to end off with is that all channels and all analytics tools work with UTMs. UTMs are one of the simplest, most effective ways for you to track your marketing efforts on the Internet. If you’re leaving links on Facebook, leaving links in email, doing an affiliate deal, you should be using UTMs on all of those links. And we couldn’t have made it easier for you, just go check out effinamazing.com/UTM, download that free tool, it will be really, really easy, and then you’ll be able to get on and running and track all of your marketing campaigns moving forward. Hey, thank you very much for having me. This has been great so far. So now it would be great to know if there’s any questions and see how I can best service everybody.
