Welcome back. Hopefully by now you’ve started the process of making your entire online business presence more mobile friendly. Today, I’ll talk about the web analytics that you can use to help you improve your MM campaigns.

You know that metrics are important in all marketing matters. This is true for any type of marketing, including mobile marketing. But, with so many small businesses being behind the score on implementing mobile, perhaps learning about mobile analytics will push you toward making the leap.Analytics

Essentially all marketing analytics study behavior to determine what actions are getting what results. Any business strategy must include analytics so that they can measure whether or not the actions they are taking are working. Without goals in mind, and ways to determine if you’re reaching that goal, and how you’re reaching that goal, you are just shooting in the dark. Only by measuring can you truly optimize all actions across all marketing channels to get the best results.

We measure our website’s performance based on page visits, page views, clicks, duration of site visit and so on. On social media we measure in terms of shares, likes, comments and so on. With mobile marketing we have to look at other metrics such as determine if our call to action has been met. Did they download, provide their zip code, email address, use the QR code, or make a payment?

In order to study metrics we have to understand who our target is, what the destination is, and what the action we want them to take is. So, for example, perhaps we own a small local beauty salon. Our target are women in their early 20’s to mid 30’s who can afford to spend an average of $100 per visit. We also live in a tourist community, and want to appeal to the traveler.

How do we do that?Foursquare

We engage in local marketing by listing our business on Foursquare, Yelp, Bing, Google + Local. We buy search terms to attract women to our shop. We ask our customers to sign up for our email newsletters and our social media sites as well as our mobile SMS marketing messages. We purchase search terms that allow us to show up in the top of mobile search. We provide landing pages, and marketing materials that appeal to our demographic.

Then, after we’ve let it loose to the world, we see what takes place by studying the metrics via the various listing sites above, and by determining if users followed our call to action to down load a coupon code via the QR code we left at a hotel in a brochure, or whether they “liked” us on Facebook after visiting the salon.

It helps to have studied how your audience is using mobile devices too. Setting up your plan about what metrics you’ll study and how you’ll study them in advance of unleashing your MM campaign is essential to your success. It will help you clearly determine your goals and the tools that you’ll use to reach those goals.

Right now there is no one tool to use to study social media metrics across all platforms. But, you can use the ones in place for each tool that you use, and build upon that. What is important is that you collect the data, have a goal to measure against, continue to segment your customers according to their behavior (as you should be doing already), and optimize and deliver the more valuable, useful and relevant content that you can to your market.

Join me next time for some tips to make your first mobile marketing campaign a success.