When you are marketing your business, it is critical to track your campaigns’ effectiveness. There are two main reasons for this. First, you don’t want to waste marketing dollars. If you implement or pay for various marketing initiatives and don't track what brings in more customers, you can waste a lot of money. If you pay attention to your analytics and lead conversions, you can easily determine which forms of marketing brings in customers and immediately eliminate marketing that isn’t working.

Secondly, you can increase your return on your investment. Tracking helps determine the best marketing channels for your business. This allows you to stop funding the channels that don’t work as well and increase your investment to the marketing channels that substantially increase your customer base.

With “traditional” marketing of radio, tv, billboard or print ads, it is hard to determine the overall effectiveness. Companies paid thousands of dollars for ads and hoped that their phones would start ringing. Online marketing allows companies of various sizes to advertise their products and services at a fraction of the cost of “traditional” advertising. However, if you aren’t tracking your online ad spend and effectiveness you can still end up with an expensive price tag for advertising.

In this article I’ll go over two very important ways to effectively track your marketing and advertisements.

Let’s talk about two forms of tracking, call tracking and online/link tracking.

Let’s start with call tracking. You may have customers that may comes across your business through marketing, referrals or search results. If they pick up the phone to call your office, you want the ability to determine which form of marketing initiated a call and track where that lead came from.

If you don’t track your calls, it is virtually impossible to learn where your influx of customer calls are coming from.

You can have a separate telephone number for your various marketing. Your website, Google Adwords, Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ads, social media, print ads, tv and radio ads will all have different telephone numbers.

Years ago, having several different telephone numbers for all of your different marketing would cost a ton of money. Then add the thousands of dollars your company had to spend on TV, radio or print ads. I wasn’t worth it.

Now, with technology you can easily track your calls with your marketing at a fraction of the cost. Cloud based communication services like Twilio rent their telephone numbers for as little as $1.00 per month.

This allows your company to have various telephone numbers, while forwarding all of the calls to your main corporate number. The Twilio dashboard will show you how many calls came in to the various telephone numbers.

CallRail is another cloud based platform that provides companies with a more robust form of call tracking. Their system tracks keywords, visitors, record your calls and tracks your campaigns with plans starting as low as $30 a month

Both offer pluses and minuses. The key is to determine your company’s goals and choose the option that best meets your corporate needs.

Now let’s move on to link tracking. Link tracking is a lot like call tracking accept your are tracking your customers online actions. Various links can be used for your online and print advertising as well as some TV and radio advertisements.

All of the links can be directed back to your corporate website. However, you increase your effectiveness and conversion rate if you forward the link to a landing page that is specific to the product or service being advertised.

When it comes to link tracking you have a variety of different options. Google offers a URL shortner that provides tracking for free. With their URL you can find out critical information like geographic location of your visitors, frequency of website visits, operating systems and a variety of helpful insights.

In contrast, LinkTrackr provides detailed information to monitor the dollar value associated with your marketing campaigns. It provides detailed reports to determine the return of your marketing investment. It also takes the guess work out of determining your customer acquisition cost.

Pretty Link is one of my favorite link trackers. Pretty Link allows you to track, shorten and cloak links, while still branding your company. For example, google’s link shortner/link tracking brands Google (goo.gl). However, Pretty Link allows you to use your company’s domain name (www.cinnamonmccann.com/23). You can created a company branded trackable link for all of your various marketing campaigns.

It’s important that all of your marketing campaigns are associated with both a trackable link and telephone number to determine it’s effectiveness. It’s critical not to skip this step.

Are you tracking your marketing efforts? What tools do you enjoy using?