Picture this: cash flow is at an all-time low, your top-line revenue has been steadily decreasing over the past few months, and your calendar is looking drier than the Sahara Desert.
Ask yourself this,
Are you spraying and praying, wasting your marketing budget on random campaigns, never truly knowing what will drive conversion?
Do you keep glaring at your calendar after spending heavily on marketing campaigns, wondering when the next qualified lead will book a sales call?
You aren’t alone. According to research, up to 60% of marketing budgets are wasted due to ineffective strategy and execution.
Your decline in sales is triggering you to panic spend more money in hopes that the problem corrects itself.
And this leads us to the existential question all businesses face when sales decline.
What truly drives sales? What causes conversions? How can a business confidently spend money on PPC or SEO and get a return on its investment?
The answer to all of these questions can be answered with 2 words: source tracking.
Source tracking is a fundamental mechanism businesses must utilize to establish where their sales are coming from, what is driving conversions, and what campaigns are killing their budget and draining their resources.
The benefits of source tracking aren’t only operational; it empowers your business by:
- Helping you pinpoint which campaigns are “money wasters” and which campaigns are the “money makers”
- Smartly allocate your budget, optimizing for the marketing channel that works best for your business.
- Allows you to create a system where you have a full view of all of your metrics and KPIs and immediately know which levers to pull to drive your sales.
Ready to stop shooting arrows in the dark? This article will give you the exact blueprint you need to start tracking youor sales. Remember, tracking your sales directly correlates to an immediate ROI. Why? Well, you simply know where to redirect your marketing budget and can immediately cut costs and save money.
What Sales Source Tracking Truly Means
When a customer comes knocking at your door, ready to purchase from you, it represents a personal journey they have taken. A digital footprint route comprised of clicks, lead magnets, Ads, email marketing, etc, all the way to your doorsteps.
Now, how about if you somehow found out about all of the possible routes they’ve taken, and you make it easier for them to reach your doorsteps by optimizing for that route?
Sales source tracking fundamentally consists of 3 basic elements:
- Source: The original starting point of your customer–think email, Meta, Google, YouTube
- Medium: The specific route that they took, which is dependent on your source. So if the source of your customer is Google, then your medium is Google Ads. If the source of your customer is LinkedIn, then the medium is social.
- Campaign: The exact thing that brought them to your doorstep. Which campaign (Ads, YouTube video, Email, Landing page) brought in the most customers?
Understanding the fundamentals of tracking sales will enable you to keep track of every lead that breathes into your sales funnel.
Every movement will be monitored by you and your team, giving you the best chance for optimization and increasing your ROI.
How To Actually Start Tracking Sales
Your sales funnel is a representation of systems and processes; think of a pipeline screwed together with nuts and bolts. Tracking sales isn’t merely looking at the revenue of your business and guessing what may be the causes for it; rather, it is an integrated system responsible for helping you keep track of your cash flow.
As someone who has been building and optimizing sales funnels for the last few years, you will not believe how many SME (Small and Medium Enterprise) business owners lack a system to keep track of sales.
It is a complete stress-reliever. One of my previous clients whom I set up a sales tracking system for literally said to me, “Ahmed, you may have saved the last few remaining hair follicles I have.”
Now, without further ado, it’s time for you to learn how to start tracking where your sales are coming from and recover valuable revenue your business deserves.
Assemble the dream team (Sales Tracking Tool Stack)
Remember how I said sales tracking plays a crucial part in a fully functioning sales funnel? Now, if we think first principles, what is a sales funnel made up of?
That’s right, tools and software. Before you begin tracking your sales, you must figure out which tools would integrate well with your business and sales funnel configuration.
UTM Parameters
UTM parameters are the invisible backbone for sales tracking that every business must set up. How does it work? Well, think of the previous example of how every single sale is a customer’s journey through your sales funnel, only this time knocking on your door with a specific badge. This badge uniquely identifies which route they took to get to your door.
That’s exactly what a UTM parameter is: unique identifiers encoded into URL links that are placed in various places in your sales funnel, usually as CTA’s. Anyone who clicks on it gets tagged and automatically tracked.
I know what you are thinking.
But Mr.Engineer, we get all that, but how does it even look, and how can we set it up?
I hear you.
A UTM parameter is composed of several components. Remember the source, medium, and campaign concepts explained earlier in the article?
Well, that’s pretty much about it. For example, if a potential customer books a call with your sales team after seeing a specific Facebook ad, you would need to set up UTM parameters and add them to a URL link.
Let’s assume you recently ran a Google ad called quick_launch. Your URL link would look like this:
https://www.yoursite.com?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=quick_launch
Do you notice the source, medium, and campaign components in the link? Those are your UTM parameters.
Now you can build this manually, or you can head on over to a URL builder like this one and automatically generate one for yourself after adding in the fields. You would then place these URL links containing the UTM parameters you created in different areas in your sales funnel (CTA in Ads, email, social media, YouTube, etc).
Pro tip: Keep a spreadsheet of your different UTM parameters, as you will be reusing them over and over again with each new marketing campaign.
GA4 (Google Analytics)
Once you’ve placed URL links containing your customized parameters throughout your sales funnel, you are now ready to track user journeys and conversions.
Google Analytics is a comprehensive tool that provides insights into user behaviour, website performance, and cross-channel customer journeys.
Now, before you go setting up Google Analytics, you must understand the mechanism it uses so you can utilize its functionality to its absolute max. You see, Google Analytics uses something called an Attribution model, and every touch point of a potential customer in your sales funnel is credited by Google Analytics.
The 3 most popular Attribution models used by businesses are the following:
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- First-Click Attribution: It credits the first touchpoint of your customer. This is useful in figuring out which campaigns are driving awareness and converting your audience from cold traffic to warm potential leads interested in knowing more about what you have to offer
- Last-Click Attribution: Google Analytics credits the last touchpoint of your customer just before they converted. This is specifically useful to figure out which campaigns are truly driving conversions.
- Data-Driven Attribution: Imagine an attribution model that can smartly identify the most influential customer journey paths? This model uses machine learning to identify the specific touchpoints that would most likely lead to a conversion.
What works best for your business is up to you, but having Google Analytics set up with an attribution model is a non-negotiable.
Dashboards
You may be thinking that Google Analytics + UTM Tracking make a formidable duo when it comes to sales tracking, and it’s all you would need, right?
Not quite. There is one last step remaining before your business has a complete sales tracking system set up.
Don’t get me wrong, Google Analytics is a powerful tool that provides insights on pretty much everything related to your customer journey, such as conversions, website/landing page traffic, drop-off rate, etc. Furthermore, It has powerful built-in algorithms that produce complex data that encompasses your whole sales funnel.
But, as a business owner or a marketer optimizing for time and efficiency, spending valuable time trying to decipher complex data on Google Analytics doesn’t sound too great now, does it? Of course, you would rather get insights instantly and act quickly with your team and adjust marketing budget and optimize for performance.
This is where dashboards solve the dilemma. A data dashboard visually represents all of your complex data, giving you instant insights that fuel powerful business decisions quickly. Let’s explore the 2 most popular tools you can get started with today:
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- Power BI: Want to jump into the deep end right away? Or are you a part-time data analyst? If so, then Power BI is the tool for you. It is a powerful data modelling software with advanced visualization capabilities. It has a steep learning curve; therefore definitely not for the beginner.
- Looker Studio: A beginner-friendly data visualization tool that lets you quickly make data-driven decisions. With its easy drag-and-drop interface, you can easily set up dashboards and reports on almost anything. Let’s say for example, you want to know how well your Ads are performing across multiple channels or if you want to know how well your organic social media is converting. After a quick integration, you can easily set those dashboards up, and you are ready to extract insights.
Conclusion
Look, at the end of the day, knowing where your sales actually come from isn’t just nice to have. It’s the difference between guessing and knowing what’s working.
Once you’ve got a handle on your sales sources, everything gets clearer. You’ll know which channels deserve more of your budget and which ones you can cut loose. No more throwing money around and hoping something sticks.
Sure, setting up proper tracking takes some work upfront. But the payoff? You’ll finally stop wasting money on marketing that doesn’t deliver.
Ready to figure out where your sales are really coming from? Book a call and let’s get you some answers.
