Tracking website visitors.

• Author: Baer, Adam
• Position: Column

Digital marketing analytics provide valuable INFORMATION about the people who are interacting with your bank through the Internet. First, it tells you how to optimize your website. Second, it updates you on the status of individual online marketing campaigns--the landing pages that users and potential customers are sent to when they click on your digital advertising.

Thus, digital marketing analytics reveal how effective your website is, which facets of the marketing efforts are working or not working and where your marketing dollars can best be spent.

In this article, I will discuss three topics: the definition of digital analytics, how to use digital analytics and the benefits of digital analytics.

Digital marketing analytics helps you figure out who your visitors are, how they interact with your bank and how you can communicate with them more effectively.

Getting started

The ability to measure traffic is the most important element of analytics. This is done in a number of ways.

First, make sure your website is tagged. Tagging allows data to be captured by the service you choose to track website activity (such as Google Analytics, Webtrends and so forth) and allows for a number of different metrics to be tracked. A best practice is to tag every page on your site including all landing pages designated for ad campaigns. It's not as daunting as it sounds, since code can be placed in a header, which then populates throughout the site.

Second, make sure any links that bring traffic to your website are tracked. This includes any ads that are being run as part of a campaign, such as text and display ads, and e-blasts or newsletters.

Google offers a uniform resource locator (URL) builder tool specifically for creating customized tracking links with multiple parameters to label each type of ad you're running. These tracking links are a crucial part to analyzing marketing data. There are a number of ways to sort and view data within Google Analytics, and properly tracking links allows you to match up the data within the platform.

Tip: The most important fields are Source, Medium and Campaign. You can track as many links as you want, and, if you use the Google URL builder, you won't have to worry about your tracking links being coded correctly, since Google makes the most important fields required.

Note: If you're not using Google Analytics you'll want to make sure the links are configured to the specifications of the service you're using. (The service can provide you with documentation on how to configure the links so that tracking parameters are captured properly by the platform.) Using tracking links allows you...