You’ve spent countless time and money on your event promotion strategy. But how can you be sure your plan is actually working?
The easiest way to increase revenue for your event is to track and measure your event promotions. Google Analytics’ basic capabilities let you measure traffic to your website from various sources — search engine results, social media, partner sites. But if that’s all you’re looking at, you’re missing out on valuable insights like:
- How one paid advertisement performs over another
- Which social media posts drive registrations
- How web visitors interact with the content on your site
With these four advanced marketing tactics, you can fine tune your marketing campaigns and get a higher return on investment (ROI).
New to Google Analytics? Get started with the basics in this post.
Advanced marketing tactic #1: UTM parameters
It’s nice to know how many people come to your site from Twitter. But which tweets perform best? And of the various marketing campaigns you’re running across the web, which are most worthy?
UTM parameters (tags you add to the end of your URLs) help you drill down to this level of detail by assigning tags to your URLs. These tags don’t just let you see that traffic came from Twitter, but from a specific tweet. When you know exactly which social post, display ad, or other type of campaign asset works, you can focus on what’s working and stop wasting time (and money) on what’s not.
Consider this common scenario:
- You’re running a campaign on Twitter.
- A Twitter user shares your tweet, with the link embedded, on Facebook.
- Another Facebook user clicks on that link to your site.
Without using UTM parameters, that last click will look like it came from Facebook. With UTM parameters, you’ll know that your Twitter campaign actually drove traffic to your site.
To create URLs with UTM parameters, use Google Analytics’ URL Builder, which helps you assign a “Campaign Name” to a link. It looks something like this:
Once you’ve started using UTM parameters, you can look within Google Analytics (Acquisition Reports > Campaigns) to see the performance of each campaign.
For step-by-step directions on how to set up UTM parameters, check out this post from Hootsuite.
Advanced marketing tactic #2: Conversion optimization
Armed with UTM parameters to better track traffic, now turn your focus to conversion optimization.
If you’re running paid ads on search engines and websites, you’ll want to measure click-through rate (CTR). CTR is the percentage of people who click on your ad after seeing it. Anything over 1% is considered a high CTR, believe it or not. So if one out of 100 people who sees your ad clicks on it, you’re doing great.
In addition to CTR, conversion rate is another valuable metric to look at. This defines how many people who click on your ad actually become customers — or in your case, attendees.
Here’s how to put that data into action:
- Assess all of your paid campaigns with these two metrics in mind.
- The ones that underperform should be tweaked or nixed.
- The ones that grab at least 1% click-through rate — and the highest conversion rate — should be cloned.
Note that certain types of campaigns tend to perform better for different goals. Display advertising, for example, is ideal for raising awareness. Search engine marketing is more effective for converting to actual registrations. So your display ad campaigns might have a high CTR but a lower conversion rate. But they’re still serving a purpose in your overall marketing strategy.
Advanced marketing tactic #3: Event tracking
Nope, this isn’t about tracking your event. Event tracking is a term Google Analytics uses to track user interactions with your content. “Events” can include downloads, video plays, or anything someone uses the mouse or keyboard to interact with on your site.
When you use event tracking, you’ll be able to see what pages people visit and know what content they interacted with. For example, if your site includes embedded video to tease a keynote speaker or your headliner, you can track how many people play the video, not just how many people land on the page.
Read Google Analytics’ detailed instructions for setting up Event Tracking.
Advanced marketing tactic #4: Goal setting
Google Analytics has one more powerful feature: goal setting. With goal setting, you’re telling Google Analytics what actions taken on your website are most important to you.
There are four types of goals available in Google Analytics:
| Type | Description | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Destination | A specific location or page is visited | Thank you for registering! page is visited |
| Duration | Sessions that lasts a specific amount of time or longer | 10 minutes or longer spent on your purchase page |
| Pages/Screens per session | A visitor views a specific number of pages or screens | 5 pages or screens have been visited |
| Event | An action defined as an Event is triggered | Social recommendation, video play |
For step-by-step instructions on tracking goals in Google Analytics, read this blog post.
Start by setting up a Destination goal to track how many web visitors complete your registration process. Once you’re set up, you’ll track goals in Google Analytics by going to Conversions Reports > Goals.
Now, here’s the important part. As you become more skilled at handling and interpreting your analytics, you need to use that information to make your marketing campaigns more effective.
Want to learn more about using free and paid marketing channels to spark early interest, maintain momentum, and finish strong? Download From On-Sale to Sold Out: Marketing and Promotion for Events for a comprehensive strategy that turns interested event-goers into paid ticket holders and registrants.
