If you’re a marketer, you’ll need to keep track of who clicked your links from any channel you use.
This can help you develop strategies for the future, understand your current mishaps, and use the information for more creative campaigns.
When you send out marketing material on a digital platform, you can track who opened your campaigns using the latest tools. It’s one major difference between digital and paper campaigns.
Link tracking is one of the most effective ways to monitor your marketing campaigns.
Source: Forbes
Whether you use social media, your website, or email campaigns, tracking your clicks is vital to understanding what works and what doesn’t. Subscriber and consumer behaviors are constantly changing, but one way to keep your finger on the pulse of your list members is by tracking their engagement.
Source: Campaign Monitor
What are link clicks and why should you track them?
A click on a link is a good indication of engagement. It means someone saw your content and decided to find out more or investigate further. You can track these clicks on all major platforms, using the tools they provide.
Specifically, you’ll want to know what your exact ROI per channel is and whether you should be spending more or less on any platform. As a conversion always starts an engagement, knowing which platforms deliver better click-through rates is vital for any marketer.
Tracking link clicks on websites
For websites, you can use Google Analytics. To do this, enable the analytics tools provided by Google and use their measurements to check all your clicked links arriving at the website.
If you use marketing channels to mostly drive traffic to your website, this is a good place to start. It gives you an understanding of which platforms generate the most traffic.
Best practices for applying UTMs for email campaigns in Google Analytics
- Use descriptive parameters: Clearly define your UTM parameters (utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign) to reflect the email campaign. For example:
utm_source=newsletterutm_medium=emailutm_campaign=spring_sale
- Consistency is key: Maintain consistency in naming conventions across campaigns to simplify reporting and analysis.
- Shorten URLs when necessary: If UTMs make your URLs too long, use URL shorteners like Bitly to keep the links tidy.
- Test your links: Always test UTM-tagged links before sending to ensure they lead to the correct landing page and that tracking is working properly.
- Analyze and iterate: Regularly review the performance of your UTM links in analytics tools, and adjust your strategies based on what works best.
Tracking clicks in social media
Similar to Google, most social media platforms will have an analytics engine. These will track individual campaigns that you promote or share organically on those platforms.
Social media can help you with reach, but it’s still the lowest ROI for marketing channels. As of June 2017, content marketing and email campaigns had a 30% ROI, compared to 17% on paid social media advertisem*nts.
Tracking email campaign link clicks
Email campaigns remain the workhorse of every marketer. The benefits of using a curated list of eager subscribers speak volumes when it comes to conversion rates.
It also applies to click-through rates, as you’ll want to track every click and subsequent action. With Campaign Monitor, you’ll be able to track different types of link clicks or CTA behavior.
This can help you identify specific blocks of content in the campaign that performed better than others.
Tracking every link click helps marketers use all available data from multiple sources to organize their marketing strategies for maximum effect.
How to measure the success of your campaigns with link tracking
You’ll need to activate the different analytics tools in every platform you use. To combine all the information, use the URL tracking tools available and you’ll be able to adjust your strategy to match your customers’ trends.
The more data you have access to, the better you can adapt quickly to increase conversions.
Does it really matter?
To continue growing a brand or a product, engaging with customers and subscribers can make or break a campaign. By improving the way you track your ROI per channel, you can improve your budgeting and run effective campaigns that are more successful in the future.
What now?
Tracking the clicks on all your links depends on the analytics available in every channel you use. The information you gather from these tools can help you make better marketing decisions for your company or brand, but it’s important to know what information matters from which channel to ensure success.
Now that you know why you should track link clicks from different channels, check out this article to learn about how effective Facebook advertising is.
