One of the most vital ingredients in your online marketing mix is metrics. In fact, it’s one of the many advantages of working online; you can track your customer, see where he or she came from, what they do, and whether they book (or not).

At Active Online Media, we work on a daily basis with businesses of all sizes, and their primary objective is more often than not to increase their online sales or enquiries in the most efficient way. The key to this is having reliable data, identifying what is important (and what is not), and using this information to structure your online marketing strategy effectively.

The data you take from your website analytics should be used to inform the decisions you make on enticing prospective customers to your website, how you engage with your potential customers on your website, how you convert these potential customers into paying customers, and how you retain these customers so that they contribute to the ongoing success of your business. These are fundamentals in building a successful website and online sales strategy, and they are dependent on the having the right information.

The right tools for the job

The most commonly used online sales metrics tools use a “last-touch” and “first-touch” model which only gives you a relatively limited insight into your customers behaviour and interaction with your website. This is flawed in the fact that they fail to identify the realty of how your customers ‘came to be’.

By using a more intelligent tracking methodology, you can more effectively understand the full picture. For instance, say your potential customer arrives at your website for the first time after clicking on a banner ad. They then travel around your website clearly interested in what you have on offer. They then leave. That same potential customer then sees your listing in the Pay Per Click advertising in Google (or another search engine) and clicks on that, and then leaves once more. Some weeks later and they return to your website having typed in a related search query into Google (or, of course, another search engine) and seen your now, more familiar website appearing rather highly in the results due to your Search Engine Optimisation strategy. They proceed and decide to make a sale.

It’s clear from the example above that this visitor didn’t just make a purchase because you appeared highly in the search engine rankings. By tracking each click made by all visitors to your website, you can create clear insights into how your visitors become customers, the journey they take and by applying an intelligent, weighted sales attribution to each element that your customers used before making a purchase, you can fully see the contribution that each of your marketing mediums made to the overall sale.

The trick is to understand all influences that contribute to each sale and every sale.

At Active, we have developed own intelligent, rules-based technology, which allows clients to not only track and understand your customers every step of the way in real-time, but it’s also a unified container tag which allows you to embed additional tracking tags simplifying the process of added and amending the page code or involving your developers.  Use of our basic platform is included in our management fee for ongoing online marketing work as we see this as part of the service, but we also offer SuperTag as a stand-alone product.

Summary features and benefits of SuperTag:

  • Measure and attribute the correct partial value of each interactive ad that drove your sale, purchase or enquiry
  • Control tags on all pages with one, simplified universal tag – you’ll never have to amend the page code or involve developers again
  • Reduce the amount paid to affiliates through de-duplication
  • Quickly implement retargeting media and immediately optimise and refine its use, based on the real-time results
  • Future-proof your website by implementing SuperTag – realtime results and putting you in control

Find out more about SuperTag by visiting www.activeonlinemarketinggroup.co.uk