Navigating the marketing landscape to stand out in your niche is a tough task, but it’s crucial to edge out competition.
The journey to find out which of your ad campaigns are truly making a mark can often lead to a data overload.
Are you finding it hard to pull out key insights from a sea of data to fine-tune your campaigns?
You’re not alone.
The digital marketing world is a complex web of channels, platforms, and metrics to figure out.
Having worked with many marketing agencies and performance marketers, I’ve seen the common challenges they face.
This experience highlighted how an marketing tracker can be a game changer in helping marketing agencies climb the ladder of success.
Now, I know what you’re thinking. “An ad tracker? Isn’t that just a fancy way of saying ‘more data to sift through’?”
But trust me, an ad tracker can be the missing piece between average ROI and big performance.
In this article, we’ll explore why marketing trackers are important for marketing agencies, spotlighting the benefits of using CPV One.
With a wide range of features, CPV One is designed to boost your ad performance, take care of repetitive tasks, ease split tests, and, most importantly, improve your reporting and analytics.
Whether you’re a seasoned marketing pro or just starting out, read on to discover how CPV One can help your agency improve efficiency, effectiveness, and ROI, becoming a valuable tool in your marketing arsenal.
Understanding Marketing Trackers
As you run a digital marketing agency, you already have clients from all kinds of businesses: e-commerce shops, brick and mortar, lawyers, SaaS… all kinds of businesses can pass through the hands of a marketing agency.
Businesses today are looking for marketing agencies that can help them achieve their goals, and the main one for each business is driving more sales. It is normal, if you run a business you want your invested money in marketing to have a big ROI, right?
And marketing agencies must be able to demonstrate measurable results to their clients. That’s where an marketing tracker like CPV One can truly help get on top of your competition.
Let’s start with the beginning: what is a marketing tracker?
At its core, a marketing tracker is a tool that allows you to measure the performance of your marketing efforts.
An Analytics with superpowers if you want!
By tracking key metrics like clicks, conversions, and revenue, you can gain valuable insights into which campaigns are driving the most sales and where you should focus your marketing efforts in the future.
Easy, right?
But how are you currently measuring your marketing performance for all your customers? Manually? Download spreadsheets from different platforms and manually add data to keep track. How do you report the results?
But tracking your marketing campaigns manually or switching between platforms can take time, not to mention that it is prone to error.
That’s where a marketing tracker like CPV One can be a great help. CPV One allows you to track all of your marketing campaigns in one place, including organic, PPC ads, email marketing, social media campaigns, and more.
And you will get access to data in real-time, about all your campaigns, all from a single dashboard!
What is a marketing agency following
I’ve heard “omnichannel” so many times in the last couple of years that sometimes I believe it is common knowledge for a business to explore all traffic sources available for it. This is the case with most of the clients of a marketing agency.
Omnichannel marketing means that a business is present on all channels where its target customers (target persona) are.
So, you as a marketing agency need to be able to check the results of your customers on all different channels.
For example, let’s say one of your clients, an e-commerce selling beauty products, in this case, you will probably run campaigns on:
- Influencers that will promote your products
- TikTok (as it is the new rage)
- Google Ads
- Microsoft Ads
- Affiliate Networks
- Newsletters
- Marketplaces
These are all your traffic channels. Multi-channel marketing.
How do you compare results and report them to your clients?
A business at the start of the road usually relies on Google Analytics to track its traffic sources. Which is good.
Let me tell you that I am really happy to see a business that at least wants to track data.
Because I’ve seen businesses with no insight into their marketing performance and this means wasted money in my opinion.
Of course, if you are a big company with a big marketing budget and you want just awareness, you are not interested in tracking all your influencers or other campaigns. You don’t care about performance. I’ve seen cases where they just want to get that money spent by the end of the year…. which is crazy if you ask me.
Unfortunately, the new GA4 is a big struggle even for experienced marketers.
But there are other options out there that can come and work on top of Google Analytics. With better results!
A 3rd party marketing tracker will track your campaigns and you will have an extra layer of tracking and real-time reports.
You may ask: “What is an extra layer of tracking?”
With an marketing tracker, you get your own tracking. Your own tracking pixel.
So, if you have the pixels from Google and Facebook on your client’s website, you will have another 3rd pixel from the tracker as well.
This will allow tracking traffic and conversions in real-time.
And, on top of that, with the integrations with the major traffic sources (Facebook, Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, TikTok, Instagram, etc) you can compare real data about your traffic with data coming from different traffic sources.
For example, I was listening to a podcast with a famous marketer recently (Evan Weber) and he was complaining recently that Microsoft Ads has sent him very bad traffic and as he got 3rd party tracking with which he was able to check the traffic, see the bots and he could combat that with Bing Ads and ask to not pay for it.
Because even these big traffic sources can make mistakes.
What does a marketing agency need to see?
In my experience, these are the most pressing needs of a marketing manager in a marketing agency:
- Attribution – this is a big concern for every marketer. What source brought this conversion? How did this user get to the website and made the purchase?
- More so, now, after the iOS14 update when tracking for Apple devices is limited. Big traffic sources like Facebook, Microsoft Bing ads, and Google Ads, rely on third-party platforms to perform extra tracking and send back that information to their algorithm. Simply because they need all the data they can get to ensure that your ads are getting to the right audience.
- And the big advantage of using a 3rd party marketing tracker to feed the attribution algorithm with conversions and other information to the traffic source is that your Cost Per Action (CPA) will go lower and lower.
- The Traffic source will know from where the conversion X is coming and you will not pay big money for guessing.
- One Dashboard for all marketing activities – for a lot of marketers that are not using a marketing tracker this is still a dream.
- But this is not a dream.
- In a marketing tracker, you can see all your campaigns in a nice-looking dashboard and you can dig in and find more information about each of them.
- Detailed reports – in-depth reports with a lot of data.
- Do you want to see what products on your website are the most sold out following your Facebook campaign? or TikTok Campaigns? Or Google Ads? Instagram?
- Maybe you were promoting Woman shoes on Facebook and after seeing this report you realize that from that campaign the most sales are for kids’ shoes.
- You can get reports telling you which campaign from Facebook is bringing the most sales and for which product. Same for TikTok, Google, or any other traffic source.
- Customer Journey – To know how your customer got to your website.
- That is a continuous dream for marketers. And not even the new GA4 can’t solve it as they still need to have the user logged in to track it. But, even if the customer journey is not perfect yet, with an marketing tracker like CPV One you can be sure you know the first touch of a customer with your website.
- Track Offline conversions – To be able to import external orders (like phone orders) in the marketing tracker for accurate reports
- Cookieless tracking
- Split A/B testing
- Plus, you can use Multivariate testing for your landing pages. This is gold in itself!
- If you are not familiar with Multivariate testing for landing pages, it works like this:
- you have one landing page with different elements (let’s say 2 CTA buttons, 3 headings, 2 subheadings, and a top image)
- If you want to test different texts for your headings or to test different texts for buttons or different featured images, usually you will duplicate the initial page for each of the variation, so you end up with more pages
- With multivariate testing you define all your texts/headlines/images using a visual editor page, then you get a piece of code that you place in the initial landing page
- So, in our example above if for the 2 buttons you want to test 3 texts, you will get 2×3 variations. If for the 3 headings you want to test 3 texts, you will get 3×3 variations. And so on. This means you will get 2x3x3x3 =54 different landing pages from one page.
- And you don’t need to copy the page, you test 54 variations using a single landing page
- In this way testing goes beyond simple A/B tests, you can test every piece of your landing page
- Sharing reports with your clients – your client will get a portal in the marketing tracker and he can see real-time reports with clicks, conversions, visits, costs… No need to compile reports from different sources as everything is in one place.
- Identify your best-performing campaigns
- Imagine a report with all your campaigns in one place. And that every morning you can check a dashboard and see the full picture of all your marketing efforts.
- Instagram got 10 conversions with a cost of $100 and a revenue of $200
- Google Ads got 5 conversions with a cost of $100 and a revenue of $300
- TikTok is over the roof with 25 conversions, a cost of $50 and a revenue of $500
- When you get an image like that before you, you will easily understand where to invest more.
- With CPV One’s tracking and reporting features, you can easily identify which campaigns are driving the most revenue and which ones are underperforming. This allows you to focus your efforts on the campaigns that are delivering results.
- Integrations – API integrations with all the major traffic sources so you take advantage of the best attribution and success. CPV Lab comes with integrations with all major traffic sources: TikTok, Facebook, Google Ads, and Microsoft Ads.
- Optimize your spending:
- By tracking your costs and revenue, you can determine the profitability of your campaigns and make informed decisions about where to allocate your marketing budget.
- Demographics and Mobile data points – you want to see from the GEO areas of your customer, what device is he using, what operating system, etc – so you can target better and have the ads compatible with all the devices of your audience
Choosing the Right Marketing Tracker for Your Marketing Agency
When you choose an marketing tracker you need to think about the main benefit it will bring: to give you more data and so, more power to grow your business.
Because you can’t have performance without data.
Another aspect to consider when you choose an marketing tracker is to check if they are interested in your success. Do they answer your questions quickly? Are they willing to help?
Also you should consider if you want a self-hosted or cloud-based ad-tracking platform.
The Cloud-based marketing trackers are easier to use because you don’t have to worry about managing servers. They offer great tracking capabilities
If you opt for a tracker that will be installed on-premises, a self-hosted marketing tracker, then you need to take care of the server part, maybe having a dedicated technical person in the team, but the advantage is that you get full control over data and unlimited data retention.
Both types are good for tracking your marketing performance and choosing one over the other depends on budget and specific needs.
CPV Lab offers both self-hosted and cloud-based solutions (CPV One).
Best Practices for Marketing Tracker Implementation
I heard people saying that implementing ad tracking with a 3rd party marketing tracker can be difficult.
So, I want to ruin that myth!
When you integrate your client’s website with an marketing tracker you will have to place only 2 blocks of tracking code on that website. And you can even use GTM to add them.
For example, for an e-commerce or SaaS product you will have:
- A tracking pixel on the product page to track the products and website visits
- Another piece of code on the checkout page to track the conversions
Those are the changes needed for the website.
Then, when you run campaigns on different traffic sources, you need to create the campaign first in the marketing tracker.
CPV One will provide you with a tracking URL that you will place in your traffic source.
Let’s say you want to run a campaign on Facebook (or Google Ads for example)
You will create the campaign there and link from your ads directly to your website.
Here you will place the tracking code provided by the tracker which will perform initial visitor tracking. This ensures that all visitor actions are tracked and you have a record of the customer journey.
And you will get all the information about that visitor: city, country, device information, mobile information, the campaign he came from, the ad he clicked, etc.
Another thing you will need to do is connect via API to your traffic source account to send back conversions to it. This is called CAPI and it valid for all major traffic sources (Facebook, TikTok, GoogleAds), etc.
This requires a one-time configuration and it allows you to make sure you send back information about conversions to improve the attribution (and decrease CPA, remember what I was saying about attribution?).
Conclusion
In today’s digital world, data is king.
Having a good marketing tracker like CPV One can really boost your marketing agency’s game. It puts all your marketing data in one easy-to-use dashboard, saving you time and giving you valuable insights fast.
This tool is great for checking how well your marketing strategies are doing across different channels and understanding your audience’s behavior.
As you work with different kinds of businesses, showing them clear, measurable results is key to building trust and a good reputation for your agency.
Every marketing campaign is a chance to show what your agency can do.
With CPV One, you’re getting more than just an marketing tracker. You’re getting a partner that helps you aim for the best. The detailed analysis, real-time reporting, and easy integration with major traffic sources make CPV One a solid choice for modern marketing agencies.
The reports you can share with your clients are clear and informative, helping to show the value you bring to their business.
Your clients want to see conversions, not just traffic, and CPV One’s data insights can help guide them towards their goals.
CPV One is a reliable and easy-to-use ad tracking tool that fits your needs. It’s the cloud-based version of CPV Lab, so you get a hassle-free setup without needing to manage hosting.
But if you prefer a self-hosted tracker, you can go for CPV Lab. It comes with the same great features, and you can just make a one-time payment and host it yourself. This way, you get to choose what works best for your agency, making it a good choice whether your agency is big or small.
Both CPV One and CPV Lab offer real-time data analysis, detailed reporting, and the ability to track and tweak campaigns across different channels, making them valuable tools for any marketing agency aiming for better results.
Choosing CPV One is a smart move that shows you’re serious about delivering great results for your clients. It’s a tool that supports your goal for accuracy, openness, and excellence in your work. Your journey in the marketing world is full of choices; make CPV One a part of your toolkit and see the difference it makes in your agency’s performance.
Step into the future of marketing analytics with CPV One and set a new standard in client satisfaction and marketing success. Join CPV One today and discover a new level of possibilities in digital marketing analytics.
Just get in touch and let’s get you some accurate data!
Author: Julia Draghici
Julia is the CEO of CPV One & CPV Lab ad tracker. She has 15+ years experience in the software industry, from development to management. For more than 5 years she is helping marketers get the best out of their marketing campaigns by using a performant ad tracker. Passionate about entrepreneurship, business and performance marketing, Julia loves helping people!