How To Monitor Your Three Essential Internet Marketing Strategies

This is a guest post by Andy Havard.

Internet marketing strategies vary depending on the nature of the blog, brand, or business and alter with accordance to their physical and digital size and their particular niche. When it comes to marketing any organization, product, or service on the web, there tends to be three essential ways of doing so:

1. Dominating social media platforms
2. Utilizing Internet video
3. Driving traffic to websites

This three-fold plan appears to be a timeless marketing approach on the net, but how do you know you’re succeeding in these areas? How do you know your campaign is ticking all the right boxes?

The following article addresses the best practices for measuring and monitoring your marketing campaign in these three areas, and provides an easy to digest guide to some of the best tools for the job.

Broad Social Media Monitoring

Depending on how social your Internet presence is, you might only be interested in certain aspects of social media data. Let’s imagine your blog, brand, or business operates a wide variety of social media from the likes of Facebook and Twitter to StumbleUpon and Instagram.  The time it would take to collect such a wide variety of data could eat up a good chunk of your day. When you’re operating in this way, the most time- efficient data to gather is a broad overview of how your overall approach is going down on the ‘net.

A great tool to collect this kind of data is a site called Klout. Klout allows you to sign in and link up a variety of social media platforms. It takes in your activity and data from all of these platforms to give you an overall social ranking – the higher the better.

This kind of information is incredibly powerful as it updates you on how much influence you’re having on your audience and your network, while giving you a tangible indication of how big your online presence is in your niche.

Oh, and it’s completely free.

In Depth Social Media Monitoring

Klout is a great way of measuring overall influence in your niche and on your social media sites as a whole, but overviews still aren’t quite as valuable as the actual facts. Obtaining the true facts and figures surrounding your social media networks are the crucial pieces of information that alert you when your approaches are soaring like an eagle or rapidly plummeting back down to earth.

HootSuite is your essential tool for monitoring in depth social media analytics. Here’s a quick glance at the data it can provide.

You can add custom reports for a whole host of your social media profiles and even incorporate essential pieces of Google Analytics data. This information is incredible valuable as it indicates the actual impact of any new approaches you take to your social media profiles, be it daily updates, frequent photo and video uploads, or competition giveaways.

As you can see, HootSuite is also great for monitoring brand awareness amongst varying genders and age groups, which will be able to affect the approach you take to upcoming marketing strategies on your social platforms.

Internet Video Tracking

The only thing rivalling the popularity of social media on the Internet today is Internet video. Sites like YouTube, Vimeo, and On Demand Television Channels are enjoying staggeringly large online viewershipsevery day. Online marketers have gotten wise to this popularity and as a result of this there has been a huge spike in video uploads and new and exciting uses of video on the Internet.

These videos are all well and good, but they offer little value to bloggers, brands, and businesses if they can’t track the actual statistics of these videos. YouTube offers a great free tool to track these kinds of facts and figures through its YouTube Insight feature.

YouTube Insights can inform Internet marketers where their video strategies are being found, the demographics watching them, which videos are the most popular, and their Channel’s overall viewership. These pieces of data are fantastic ways to monitor the implementation of video approaches to new products, services, and the building of online brand awareness through video. By being able to assess the sheer popularity of specific video content, marketers can track what styles of video benefit their brand, business, or blog the best.

A great feature along these lines is YouTube’s Hot Spot feature:

Being able to spot what parts of your video content are boring your viewers and what parts are being re-watched again and again is crucial information when it comes to planning your next Internet video marketing strategy.

Precise Website Analytics

The uses of social media platforms and Internet video are all ultimately about driving audiences to one final website destination. Conversely, some organizations actually use their website as their home-hub for all of this activity by creating forums for social interaction, and embedding videos onto their website, doing away with any other website platform but their own.

Regardless of which approach is being used, a designated website is usually the final destination for any marketing strategy. With that being the case, the analytics of online users interacting and visiting such websites are imperative. This is where Google Analytics comes into play:

Google Analytics offers a huge array of monitoring tools for free users and even more for users willing to pay for their (rather pricey) Premium package. Above, you can (somewhat) see the array of free tools on the left and the very informative Visitor Overview in the middle.

Not only does this tool easily display the traffic generated in a certain time period, but it also informs the users where in the world these users are visiting the site from. In-depth tools within Analytics can also indicate if users came to your site through your other video and social media campaigns.

It’s crucial to notice areas like Page Visits and Bounce Rates as it clearly shows whether users are interacting with your website, taking in your message, and fulfilling the criteria your strategies had intended to achieve.

Not bad for a completely free tool, right?

Summary

By using these affordable online tools to track your Internet marketing strategies, you can ensure all of your approaches in the online world are ticking all the right boxes. Being aware of rises and falls in your content, online presence, and Internet influence will be exceptionally valuable when planning your next online marketing campaign.

Have you got any extra handy tools to share? Be sure to drop a comment and share your knowledge.

Andy Havard is a Marketing Executive at Skeleton Productions, a UK based Internet video production company.