What tools do I need to track the effects of my SMS campaigns?

Traditionally, SMS marketing campaigns have been limited in their ability to provide the marketer with actionable data. However, with more and more smartphones connecting to the internet, marketers are now better enabled to track how much website traffic they are directly receiving from an SMS marketing campaign.

There are four components that you will need in order to successfully track your SMS to website traffic:

• An SMS service, such as TextAnywhere’s TextCampaign service.
• A landing page on your web site.
• A web site analytics package, such as Google Analytics.
• A URL shortening tool, such as tinyurl.com.
  

Before sending your SMS campaign, ensure that you have set up your web site analytics package to track visitors who have clicked on the link you have provided within your SMS message body and subsequently arrive on your nominated landing page. Your landing page should ideally be a specific page set up for your SMS marketing campaign, but could just be an existing web site page, such as your home page.

When sending your SMS campaign, make sure that you use a URL shortening tool when you include your website (or designated landing page) within your SMS message body. This ensures that your lengthy natural web page address is replaced with a much shorter version that helps to maximise the amount of SMS message body left for you to convey your marketing message and call to action.

When your recipients start clicking on the link, you will be able to track traffic coming through to your website and follow user behaviour on the site through your analytics application.

Once you can track message recipients that have clicked on the link in your SMS message, you can begin to measure the success of your SMS marketing campaign, and attribute a Return on Investment (RoI) to your marketing spend.

For more information on tracking the success of your SMS marketing campaigns, you can read our Measurable SMS Marketing Guide here.

If you would like to find out more information about TextAnywhere’s solutions please call our Customer Service team on 08451 221 302.