You are running various digital marketing campaigns across multiple platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn etc to drive leads to submit Slate hosted forms and get them into your instances, but how are you tracking and tuning these campaigns across the different platforms?
Tracking digital marketing efforts across platforms is essential for determining the effectiveness of these campaigns, and being able to tune them accordingly. Typically, Google Tag Manager is what you would use to centrally configure and publish tags. Then, by monitoring Google analytics, you can examine your web traffic, behavior and conversion tracking. Along the same lines, prospects’ response to your digital marketing efforts can be traced back to Slate using some of its native functionality and the Google Tag Manager. By adding Google Tag Manager to the Slate instance, form submissions can be tied back to prospects that came through the digital marketing efforts. However, Google Analytics returns aggregate data and not the identity of individual prospects.
By taking advantage of UTMs (Urchin Tracking Module), you can not only track on Google Analytics how a prospect landed on a particular webpage, but you can also attribute individual form submissions to digital campaigns. UTMs are codes that can be appended to custom URLs to track various marketing campaigns.
It is not uncommon for prospects who land on a webpage from an ad, to look for additional information on the site before submitting a form, or even come back another time to submit a form. UTM parameters will not get passed onto the Slate form in such cases.
To avoid this, add a cookie to the webpage that will record the UTM parameters and pass them through the pages. The UTM parameters saved in Slate through form submissions can then be analyzed using queries and reports to inform your marketing initiatives. If you are unfamiliar with this process, your web manager and/or third party digital agency should be familiar and able to assist.
Use Slate’s native feature called Ping Analytics to further monitor web access! When Ping code is embedded into any webpage, a cookie is sent to each visitor’s browser. When that visitor has a corresponding record in Slate, behaviour such as the number of times a page was accessed and for how long can be tracked. Using a Custom HTML tag in Google Tag Manager, Slate Ping script can be injected into multiple webpages. By retrieving Ping data through queries, relevant communication with person-specific content can be sent to prospects.
Lastly, Slate pushes data to platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn and others. Pushing audiences to Facebook is straightforward by using the Facebook API, but passing prospects on to other social media platforms could need additional integration with external task automation tools such as Zapier.
While there are undeniable benefits to optimizing marketing strategies across platforms using one or all of these methods, it is important to think about what is most relevant to your institution. Therefore, start small, plan how your platforms and systems can effectively work in sync with one another, and scale your efforts as you learn and grow!