Us marketers need to be smart about how we’re investing our money because budgets are always smaller than we’d like. In particular, we need to make sure that we drive our media budget as far as possible by reducing wastage on under-performing channels. Too often, marketers wait until the conclusion of a campaign to analyse performance. In doing so, they gain insights on how to optimise future campaigns but can miss out on valuable opportunities to make the campaign they’re already running as successful and cost-effective as it can be.
“So how exactly do I gain insights in real-time?” I hear you ask. Let us introduce you to UTMs!
Real-time media performance tracking and analysis doesn’t have to be complicated. UTMs are a valuable and often overlooked tool enabling you to feed valuable performance data directly into the Peazie Platform.
Let’s take a step back for a second – What are UTMs and why are they valuable for me?
‘UTM’ stands for ‘Urchin Tracking Module’ (I know, not a name that gives you a lot of information). Essentially they are extended versions of the campaign URL generated for each digital media source used to drive traffic to the microsite.
When you link media to the microsite via its respective UTM and a user clicks on that link, they are taken to the normal microsite landing page, but the Peazie Platform records that they came from that specific source (eg. Website tile, Facebook post, etc). Therefore you can track visitors, entries, and conversion rates in real-time for every digital channel you use to drive traffic to the microsite (cool, right?).
PLUS – You can calculate an average Cost per Entry for each individual channel that you’ve tracked because you have access to the number of entries arriving from each one, allowing you to benchmark and measure financial performance as you go.
Using UTMs on a granular level allows you to understand:
- Where your campaign visitors and entrants are coming from
- Which audiences are most and least engaged with your brand/campaign
- What are the most effective media sources for you to communicate and engage with your audience
- (When coupled with A/B testing of creative) What messaging and imagery your audience is most receptive to
- The financial performance of individual media channels
… The list goes on.
How does this tie back in to getting more bang for my (media) buck?
We’re glad you asked! If UTMs are used across all digital links to the microsite, because we can track the traffic and entries from them in the back-end of the Peazie Platform, you’re able to easily measure and manage your media performance in real-time. As a result, you can quickly identify channels that are driving poor results and divert spend to other, higher-performing channels which will then make your media budget work more efficiently.
Let’s take a look at an example, shall we?
Looking at the above example, we can see that ‘facebook-single-ad’ (in green) is the most effective Facebook source in terms of driving a high volume of visitors and entries (and subsequently a high conversion rate). Based on this, you may want to divert spend from a lesser-performing source to that one.
We know what you may be thinking – “but I don’t know how to put together those links! What do I do?” Don’t worry, we’ll take care of generating the links for you based on the media you’re planning on running. All you need to worry about is making sure that you use a different UTM on each digital link to the microsite. What’s most important to know is how they can be valuable for you and your brand.