Tracking the Success of your Marketing Campaigns

Tracking the performance of your marketing campaigns online – and getting the information you need to tweak them where necessary – is a critical aspect of race marketing success. Just like you wouldn’t go back to the same hotel if you gave it a 1-star review on trip advisor, you shouldn’t keep putting money behind something that has a poor conversion rate if you can help it.  

Fortunately, there are a number of tools, including some on your Eventrac platform, that can help you get on top of your traffic acquisition channels and conversion statistics, as well as make a bunch of other everyday marketing tasks that little bit easier.

Facebook Insights

If you’re interested in understanding the performance of your Facebook page, groups and content, you can turn to Facebook Insights.

There are some helpful answers you can get from Facebook Insights that can help your race promotions marketing efforts, such as:

  • Profiles of your Facebook page followers/group members. This will add to your understanding of your audience demographics when it comes to creating audiences for advertising campaigns. This will be available on your eventrac platform for people who have already bought tickets to your event, so your facebook insights will help you work out if there are any other groups interseted that haven’t committed as far yet. You can also use these same audience demographics when discussing your audience profile with race sponsors. 
  • Best performing posts and content. This will help focus your efforts towards more engaging content and help you decide what type of content to boost through advertising campaigns.
  • Competition Comparison. Use the Pages to Watch tab to track pages from similar events and aim to stay ahead of them in key growth and engagement metrics.
  • Most active members. You can check out your most active members and discussions to help identify potential race ambassadors, key influencers in your community and topics your participants like talking about.

Your Facebook Ad Spend Results

On your Facebook Ads Manager, you will be able to see how much you are spending per lead, or per chosen ‘action’ taken on your advert. If the goal of your Ad was to drive people to your website, your ad will calculate the click-through rate cost. The better the ad, and the more appropriate/personalised to the audience it is, the lower the cost of each lead or action will be. 

So, its definitely worth looking at which adverts have achieved the highest number of leads per £ spent, to improve iteratively on the ones that perform best. A couple of things which could affect the success of your ad could be:

  • Quality and content of your picture
  • Video length and thumbnail
  • Title information
  • Ad goal chosen 
  • Play around with these to see which achieves the best result. 

Its worth bearing in mind however, that a key mistake that can be made when creating your ads is focusing on ‘Vanity Metrics’ rather than page engagement. Vanity metrics are for example how many likes you have on your facebook page. They can help your profile look great, but it’s not what will get you more entries. You can achieve a great social media profile as a by-product of having good engagement with your potential clients, and a large customer base of people who have bought tickets to your events. This is why you should never spend your Facebook advertising budget on directing people to your Facebook page.

Depending on what stats you turn to, the average organic reach for 2018 seems to have crashed to anything between roughly 1%-5%. That means, for every 1,000 Likes you obtain through your advertising, only about 10-50 people will engage with your page. Which means, in turn, that the real cost of obtaining those likes is anywhere between 20-100 times higher than the Cost per Like (CPL) you see on your Facebook ad manager. Assuming you pay £1 for each of those likes, your real cost per page follower could be anything between £20-£100.

And after you’ve paid that £20 to get someone to engage with your posts on Facebook, what? Well, you now face the following handicaps:

  • You still need to work to get that person to your website, i.e. you’re back at square one.
  • You have no means of contacting your page follower or interacting with them other than through posting content on your page (or targeting them again through paid advertising).

So, if not boosting page Likes, what should your Facebook campaigns aim to achieve? Drive traffic to your website and start people on the journey to signing up for your race. For more info on creating winning ad campaigns, see our guide on Using Facebook Ads for your Event.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a traffic tracking and analytics tool for your website and an absolute must-have for any website owner.

You can install Google Analytics on your website by adding a little piece of code on your webpages’ headers. If your website runs on one of the popular website platforms, like WordPress, Squarespace etc, you can install your Google Analytics tracking ID on your website in a matter of seconds – just check with your platform for instructions. If not, talk to your developer about adding Google Analytics on your website for you.

Once installed and tracking website visitors, Google Analytics can help answer a number of key questions:

  • Visitor statistics. How many visits do you get and how do they grow or decline over time? Where do your visitors live?
  • Traffic acquisition. How are visitors finding your website? Are they clicking on a listing on a race calendar or finding you by searching Google? Are they coming through Facebook or Twitter?
  • Visitor behaviour. What pages do people visit the most? How do they navigate between pages once they land on your website? How much time do they spend on each page?

Besides the very valuable traffic analytics, Google Analytics also provides a number of additional website insights, such as page loading times, with suggestions that can help you improve your website’s performance and visitor experience.

Facebook Pixel

The Facebook pixel is code that you place on your website. It collects data that helps you:

  • Track conversions from Facebook ads
  • Optimize ads
  • Build targeted audiences for future ads
  • Remarket to people who have already taken some kind of action on your website.

It works by placing and triggering cookies to track users as they interact with your website and your Facebook ads.

There used to be a time when you would post something on your page, hoping that everyone following your page would see it. But not anymore. The decline in Facebook organic reach (the number of people who get to see what you have to say without you spending money on it) is nothing new. Pretty much ever since Facebook decided they had to make some money out of the platform, brands had to pay – or find new ways – to reach their target audience. Retargeting people who have shown interest in your pages and events, however, is one way of building a larger organic fan base. 

The Facebook pixel provides important information you can use to create better Facebook ads, and better target your ads to achieve retargeting. The tracking pixel data helps ensure your ads are seen by the people who are most likely to take your desired action. The retargeting pixel data and dynamic ads allow you to show targeted ads to people who have already visited your site. These data sets allow you to improve your Facebook ad conversion rate and get a better ROI. 

Even if you’re not using Facebook ads yet, you should install the Facebook pixel now. It will start collecting data right away so that you don’t have to start from scratch when you’re ready to create your first Facebook ad.

You can even track customers across their devices. This lets you see if people tend to see your ads on mobile but switch to a desktop before buying. Or, maybe it’s the other way around. This information can help you refine your ad strategy and calculate your return on investment.

For more on setting up a facebook pixel, see the facebook Step by Step guide to installing the Facebook Pixel.

Eventrac Features

Don’t forget to use the features on your Eventrac platform to look at where your customers are coming from. There are a couple of things you can do to analyse your ticket sale origins, and optimize your ads and marketing efforts thereafter. 

  • Tracking Links: You can create custom links which apply to your various marketing and display platforms. For example, if you create a Facebook ad, you can use the tracking link to monitor how many people are using that specific link to come through to your entry portal.
  • Lets Do This Integration: If you use lets do this as a marketing channel for your event, you’ll see which entries have come from here on your downloadable entry report. 
  • Find a Race Integration: If you use lets do this as a marketing channel for your event, you’ll see which entries have come from here on your downloadable entry report. 
  • Monitor used discount codes: If you have created discount codes, you’ll see which ones have been used, how many times, and which ones haven’t. If you set expiry dates for these it will be useful for you to know which ones worked effectively in the numbers you were aiming for. 

Optimize but don’t Skimp on Content

So there you have our top pick of tools and analysis tips to dig deeper into your marketing campaign success. One more important thing that can help your campaigns go a long way, alongside carefully analysing them, is not skimping on quality race graphics, videos and content. Because an ad with a blurry picture or comic sans graphic is always going to perform poorly no matter how many times you ‘optimize’ it. This costs money, and designer rates are barely affordable in many cases.

BUT don’t give up looking for good value photographers and designers, because quality ad creatives will save you a ton of money down the line. They will instantly set your ad and event apart from others, and help build equity in your event brand. So don’t be cheap with them and – where you can afford it – spend what you have to for a great result.

If you can’t afford to spend the money, spend some time learning to use some of the amazing free tools out there to create your own eye-catching graphics. Tools like Canva and even Google Docs’ own Drawings app. For quality free images, hit sites like Pixabay and Flickr (making sure you filter results for the right usage license). With a bit of patience and effort, you will be able to build your own. 

 

On Hand To Help

The team at Eventrac are on hand to assist with all components of your event. From advice on promoting your event through low cost channels such as social media, to a guided tutorial on a specific feature of Eventrac. We are here to help.

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