Tracking marketing data with WordPress

If you’ve attended one of our WordPress client training webinars you might have caught onto the passion that I have for analytics. Marketing analytics in particular. I often corner people and hand out an ear bashing about how you should know what you’re website is doing. If you’ve not experienced one of these onslaughts then get a small dose over here – “Is your WordPress site working for you?“.

In today’s post I’m going to introduce you to campaign tracking.

Campaign Tracking – what is that?

The tools to track your marketing campaigns are easy to get in place, there is just a little bit of know-how that’s required. You’ll need Gogole Analytics, your WordPress site and a new plugin the we’ve just released. More on that later.

Google Analytics supports granular campaign reporting. With some tracking setup it will help you answer questions like this:

• The visitors on my WordPress site, where are they coming from?
• I’m doing a variety of marketing online, which of these activities end up in more visitors?
• Which activities attack visitors that buy more green widgets from my site?

All solid questions. All questions for which you’ll want to know the answer.

To begin this kind of tracking you’ll want to know about Google Campaign URLs. When you put a link to your site, be it the home page or a blog post internally instead of just using the address like this:

http://YourWebsite.com/

You use a tracking URL, that might look like this:

http://YourWebsite.com/?utm_source=Twitter.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=Sample%20Campaign

Now before you run and hide it’s not complicated or hard to make these URLs. I have written a full tutorial that gets into the detail on how to create the URLs – I’ll link to that in a moment.

Before I send you off to read though I want to give you the second part to this puzzle that is really cool. When someone fills in an enquiry form on your WordPress site, you get a notification that comes to you via eMail. You can also setup your site to send you this tracking data alongside the enquiry.

So, you can see their name, eMail and their enquiry (ie all the normal fields that you might have in your form). In addition to this you can see that they came to your site from a link that you published on Twitter, or perhaps you’re search engine optimisation efforts are going well, so you can see that the enquiry came from a user that found you on Google.

It completes the circle. Marketing activity, through to a lead landing on your desk. You can now know exactly where the good leads are coming from, where to focus your efforts in future to bring in more quality leads.

Sounds good huh?

We have just released a new plugin that allows all of this to come together for your WordPress site. And there is solid tutorial that goes with it to get you skilled up on these marketing tracking methods.

Campaign Tracker for WordPress

In all of our spare time :) we also write and release a range of WordPress plugins. We have operated our brand HelpForWP.com for about three years now.

Through our work here at The DMA building WordPress sites we often come across situations where we create a plugin for WordPress to solve a particular problem. Many of these have then gone on to be plugins that we have released and now offer to a global audience of WordPress developers and users. Campaign Tracker for WordPress is a great example of this.

Clients for whom we host your WordPress sites can access a licence for these plugins at no cost, so if you’re interested in using Campaign Tracker for WordPress let our team know.

Check out the full tutorial: An introduction to campaign tracking with WordPress.