Over the years, “analytics” has become a marketing buzzword. And as marketers, we understand why. Proper web analytics are essential for everything from measuring the success of your website to making strategic improvements.
But, what happens when the traditional methods for tracking analytics methods aren’t available?
How do you know which Goolge ads are actually resulting in sales? How can you measure which blog posts are converting leads? How can you track the success rate of your social media activity and your e-newsletters?
You get creative!
Throughout this post we explain one of the most common analytics hiccups and outline a one of the creative solutions we’ve outlined.
Third-Party Payment Solutions Sometimes Limit Analytics Integration
Do you like making sales and collecting donations when you’re sleeping? Of course you do! With an online payment solution you can.
However, developing a highly functional and user-friendly online payment solution requires an immense amount of research, development, and analytics tracking.
Unless you’re a massive organization – think Alaska Air and Target – chances are pretty good you aren’t using your own payment gateway. Building and maintaining an online checkout and payment system is a HUGE endeavor. In fact, it is so huge multiple companies specialize in doing just that. Business like Square, Braintree, Etsy, Vendini, and Shopify have created highly specialized, successful e-commerce solutions.
These e-commerce specialists can relieve your organization of costly research and development. And, within each platform, you can track details such as number of sales, time spent in cart, user demographics, and date and time of purchase.
The hiccup is, sometimes a third-party solution doesn’t communicate back to your own analytics – or a shared analytics system like keen.io. If this happens, you can’t track a customer from ad click to purchase point. Nor can you track the return on investment (ROI) of your marketing efforts.
These statistics are vital for optimizing your online presence, determining what marketing campaigns are working and what aren’t, and identifying customer pain points.
Optimize your online presence by identifying effective marketing campaigns and customer pain points.Click to Tweet
A Little JavaScript Allowed Tracking the Untrackable
Working closely with Redlands Symphony, we ran into a barrier tracking ticket sales from click to purchase.
They utilized Vendini, a highly specialized ticketing solution. Vendini allows the symphony to provide online ticket purchasing and printing. Additionally, it let the symphony’s sales team streamline the management of their sales and inventory. It has been a vital service to let them take control of their concert ticketing.
Unfortunately, Vendini’s analytics were self-contained. The symphony was able to track the number of people their ads sent to Vendini. They were able to see how many people made purchases. But, they were not able to track which of those purchases came from which ad.
In order to track the untrackable, we utilized Google Analytics’ Javascript SDK to trigger specific page views. When the buy ticket links were clicked and before they were taken to Vendini’s purchase site, we triggered a unique URL visit of a non-existent page we’d created within the symphony’s analytics account.
Creatively track the untrackable to determine your marketing effort’s ROI.Click to Tweet
It was not a perfect solution by any means. But by thinking a little outside the box, we were able to help identify where the increase in ticket sales were originating. We could track the clicks from AdWords to their website and from their website to Vendini.
Considering each click as a conversion, we were able to compare the number of conversions to the number of tickets sold on Vendini. This allowed us to measure the symphony’s ROI.
How’s Your ROI?
Not sure if you’re getting the most out of your online performance? A digital evaluation is a great place to start.
During your digital evaluation, our team will take a close look at your entire online presence. We’ll identify what’s working and areas where you could make improvements. Additionally, we can take a close look at your analytics, offering creative solutions for better tracking and optimization.
Have any questions? We’d love to connect about making your business brilliant.
