7 Analytics Tools to Track Local Campaigns

Gut feelings and instinct can only take business owners so far. To determine the actual value of local campaigns, marketers need access to raw data. Unfortunately, obtaining this information — and then using it to compare two or more hyperlocal platforms in a head-to-head setting — isn’t always as straightforward as it seems. As a result, 80% of marketers say they struggle to demonstrate the effectiveness of their marketing spending, campaigns, and activities.

Rather than relying on DIY Excel spreadsheets and complicated algorithms, businesses are increasingly turning to outside analytics platforms to measure the effectiveness of their local campaigns. Here are seven platforms that businesses can use.

1. Cyfe: Monitor business data in a centralized location.
The more marketing platforms a business uses, the most time its owners spend track the ROI of their campaigns. Cyfe is a cloud-based business dashboard that organizations can use to monitor and share data from hundreds of services in one place. Cyfe uses pre-built widgets to pull data from local marketing services like SendGrid, Facebook, Twitter, Google AdWords, Campaign Monitor, PayPal, and many other apps. Businesses can then track the number of new sign ups, subscriptions, downloads and other KPIs in real-time. Using the marketing dashboard, they can monitor channels like email, SEM, SEO, and social media. A social media dashboard is also available for tracking trends on Facebook and Twitter.

2. Wildfire: Connect the impact of local campaigns.
A division of Google, Wildfire is a social media marketing tool that allows businesses to connect the impact of their digital campaigns. Users are encouraged to integrate Wildfire, Google Analytics, and Google Tag Manager into their websites in order to view the relationship between online advertising, paid and organic social engagement, and website conversions. Tracking codes are added to every link posted through Wildfire on social media, enabling businesses to determine which networks and which campaigns are bringing customers to their websites. Ultimately, businesses can use Wildfire to track which local platforms are responsible for the highest number of online sales, coupon downloads, and email leads.

3. quintly: Benchmark local marketing performance.
Businesses that manually track social media KPIs can save themselves time and hassle by adopting an automated platform like quintly. Quintly connects to local platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+, and LinkedIn. The tracking and benchmarking tool uses more than 115 metrics to measure its users’ social media marketing performance against their competitors, showing businesses when they should post certain types of content and which types of content (images, links, videos, etc.) perform best. Automated reports with social media stats and trends also help users stay on top of their campaign performance.

4. Umbel: Unify local data across platforms.
Umbel is a platform that’s all about data. Using “intelligent segmenting,” businesses can see who is engaging in their online ads, video, and sponsored content in real-time. Audience slices are tracked across time, location, and content, allowing businesses to make quick campaign adjustments to increase conversions. For example, a business might notice that its latest mobile campaign is only reaching customers in a certain geographic area. As a result, the business might want to tweak that campaign to expand its reach. Or, the business might decide not to run campaigns on a certain ad network in the future, if that network isn’t attracting customers in the company’s target demographic. Umbel also integrates with iBeacon to merge online and offline behavior patterns.

5. Crowdbooster: Optimize social media campaigns for better results.
Crowdbooster provides users with raw data to show the effectiveness of Facebook and Twitter campaigns. Businesses can see the total impressions, reach, and engagement connected to their social media strategies. Using Crowdbooster’s tools, they’re offered advice on which specific actions should be taken to improve on those metrics. Crowdbooster lets users drill down to see which of their posts have the most viral reach and which customers are most enthusiastic about their brands. The platform then comes up with “intelligent alerts” and “personalized recommendations” to help users recreate their most viral moments.

6. Sysomos: Track conversions from local campaigns.
Businesses can’t improve their local marketing campaigns if they aren’t willing to listen. Sysomos offers a suite of measurement, monitoring, listening, and engagement tools for organizations that are interested in tracking the impact of their online efforts. Sysomos tracks the conversations happening within social and traditional media and uses proprietary language processing technology to “extract insights and intelligence.” It then turns those online conversations into metrics and delivers insights to businesses through an online dashboard. Sysomos also offers competitive analysis tools to compare a business’ reach, share of voice, and brand impact against its competitors.

7. WhatRunsWhere: Use data to reduce waste in ad dollars.
A competitive intelligence service for online media buying, WhatRunsWhere provides advertisers with information about how they can improve the effectiveness of their local media buys. WhatRunsWhere tracks thousands of publishers and identifies the companies advertising on their sites, and then extracts details about which creative messages are leading to the highest levels of engagement. By learning where their competitors are advertising, and where they’re having the most success, businesses can make more strategic marketing decisions. They can also discover new traffic sources and generate new ideas to improve their campaigns.

Know of other tools that businesses can use to track local campaigns? Leave a description in the comments.

Stephanie Miles is a senior editor at Street Fight.