In the conversion rate optimization work I do with clients, one of the questions I’m asked – often is “Rachna, what do I actually need to track??”
My short answer is: pretty much everything.
Though I realize that isn’t all that enlightening, so let’s get a little more specific.
One thing that real-time marketing allows is almost on-the-fly adjustment for lead generation and conversion rate improvement.
The more you market effectively and consistently, the more people start to pay attention.
And if you support that attention by being helpful, real, and trustworthy, you will get more and more people interested in who you are and what you do.
So the more timely you can be, and the more real and helpful, the better your results will be.
However, that’s sort of the container, not really the specifics. Let’s look at some key performance indicators (KPI’s) that will be useful to keep track of. If you use social media frequently, you want to track these in real time, or as close as you can get.
- Owned Audience – While no one really “owns” their audience as they’re free to leave whenever they want to, you’ll want to know how many people you’re already connected to actually click through and perform any action based on a new event.
- Website Visitors – When you participate actively, does it affect your website visitors right away? You can use Google Analytics to view real-time activity on your website right now to see if your efforts make a difference.
- Total Leads – How many leads do you collect in the 24 hours after the event?
- Customers – Do you get new customers within 24 hours of the event?
- Recurring Revenue – How many of these new customers end up as repeat customers?
- On-Page Activity – Check your on-page activity during the event. Does it change? What happens?
- Social Media Activity – Once you start your real-time marketing effort, how many times is your message shared or responded to?
- Checkouts – Do people check out without issue? Are there abandoned carts?
- Conversion Rates – What is your lead to purchase conversion rate at the moment or for the 24 hours after the event?
By paying attention to these KPIs, you can understand whether or not your real-time marketing efforts are working. You’ll want to set up the ability to see these KPIs live during any specific event, and the 24 hours after the event.
You can use a lot of the information you gather to improve future real-time marketing events as well as to create better follow up. For example if you have a lot of shopping cart abandonment, you can activate a remarketing campaign to get them back to your shopping cart and complete the sale.
Using these real-time metrics can give you almost instantaneous feedback that your marketing is working.
