In my last post I talked a bit about the importance of tracking the success of your marketing campaigns. I mainly talked about how cookies can be used to help track conversions. Today I’m going to tell you about some more strategies you can employ to track the success of an individual marketing effort.

Analytics Programs: Analytics software such as Google Analytics (which is free), Web Trends or Omniture SiteCatalyst can help you figure out where your site traffic is coming from and what it’s doing once it arrives on your site. These programs are highly effective for measuring the success of an online marketing campaign. Especially savvy marketers often create individual landing pages for each marketing campaign. This means you can check the traffic on that one page and get an instant view of how much traffic your campaign generated. These landing pages also allow you to tailor copy to match your campaign.

Landing Pages: Landing pages on your website are not only helpful for tracking online marketing campaigns, they can be used to track just about any kind of campaign you run. Lets say you run a radio spot and you want to know how much traffic your radio spot generated for your site. Rather than announcing your company website during the commercial, you’d announce the landing page URL you set up for the spot. That way you’d know visitors coming to your site through this page found you from the radio ad. You could also cookie visitors coming in this way so that when they make purchases you’ll be able to track the conversions.

Dedicated Phone Lines: If you frequently deal with customers by phone, having dedicated phone lines for each of your marketing campaigns is an easy way to find out how the customer found you. You can have a special number for your ad in the local paper and another one for your radio commercial. Be sure that you’ve got a system in place to record the number of calls and sales you get from each phone line.

Coupon Codes: Coupon codes serve as double duty marketing tools. They not only give customers incentive to shop with you, they give you information about how the customer found you. Providing a special coupon code for each of your marketing campaigns means that when customers buy you’ll know how they discovered you.

If all else fails, ask. It’s low tech and not always the most automated approach but it never hurts to ask customers how they found out about you. This can be a drop down box on your website check out form or a question that’s asked when customers call or come into your store. You might also find out that word is being spread about your company from a source you didn’t even know about.

Whatever tactic you use to track your success, make sure you have plans to store and analyze this data. You’ll want to know what happened with each of your marketing campaigns so you can decide which ones to try again and which ones to ditch for the future.