Performing Health Checks and Analytics Tracking for Your Gym
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Once the heavy lifting of setting up your gym’s campaign components is done, the next big move is to set up tracking methods to gauge success. While some people may be tempted to skip this step to get their campaign live immediately, taking the additional time and energy to factor in metrics capturing is extremely beneficial.
In this page, we will go over the following topics as it regards to campaign tracking and performance health for your gym’s marketing efforts:
What are Tracking Analytics for Your Gym’s Marketing Campaign
Don’t let the phrase “tracking analytics” make you feel like you are about to get super scientific with your gym’s marketing. What is typically meant when this phrase is used is that you will be getting some data that will help give you insights into what is working (or not working) in the form of engagement. The other point to keep in mind is that not all data points are equal, straightforward, or easy to access; however, knowing your ‘what,’ ‘how,’ and ‘why’ concerning your data will help guide you along with this process.
To answer the “what” and “how” questions concerning data collection – i.e., what data points and how you will collect that information- you need to know your “why.” So, what are you trying to find out about your gym’s marketing campaign exactly? Do you want to find out how many people are finding your website? How many people are clicking your ads? Are your ads actually generating new membership sign-ups? These are all potential questions that could keep you up at night, and data can help answer them. Knowing the questions you have early on will help you structure your website, campaigns, and even interactions in a way that may allow you to quantify your findings effectively.
Once you know the questions you want insights into and have structured your digital content to capture relevant data, you can go live with your materials. Once live, you can view the various data sets to help give perspective as to how users are interacting with the materials through how many sessions or visits are at each resource, how long they’ve interacted with the materials, if they’ve clicked specific links, or even if they’ve purchased/converted something specific. This is not to imply that the data will come in a nice, clean report structure (unless you are paying for that sort of service with an agency). For most people, this information will come in digital reports, downloadable spreadsheets, or on-page metrics per material piece. Also, the data might not always be as in-depth as you wish it could be; however, many times, the data you are working with can give you a “good enough” insight for quick and more competent business decision-making with your gym.
How and Where to Build Metrics Capturing Into Your Gym’s Resources
To start setting up analytics for your business, focus on your information hub first. An information hub is essentially a centralized location where you host the primary information and materials of your business as well as the place you want to drive your sales funnel to, with the goal of converting leads to new clients. For most fitness facility owners, this hub will probably be their website; for others, it might be their Facebook business page, Google business profile, or a portal page from their membership management system.
No matter the case, establishing a data collection process on this hub is a key start; however, each type of hub may look different regarding how that information is collected and presented. For website owners, you will want to use a website analytic tracking software plugin – many people utilize Google Analytics as it is free, easy to implement, and gives some great insights and reporting capabilities. Additional extensions can be added to website code as well for further tracking enhancements, such as the Meta Pixel to help enhance data ties with Facebook and Instagram advertising campaign metrics. For other hub-type users, you will be limited to the data and analytics tools provided by the developers of your page – these can typically be found on your admin page and will usually have basic visitors, clicks, graphs, and date range adjustments available.
Once your gym’s data hub is set up for analytics tracking, the next step is to start tracking the other elements of your campaign. Pieces like social media posts, videos, advertisements, promotions, and even printed handbills can all have an analytics element built into them for your data-collecting purposes.
Tracking Social Media Posts From Your Gym
For basic social media analytics, the provider will typically give those to you when you log into the account they are being posted from. Common insights include reach, views, likes, shares, clicks, etc. Unfortunately, this data isn’t very insightful about who these people are (aside from seeing who likes/reshares things). However, when posts link to your hub and website analytics are set up, you can typically dive into your traffic source data points on the hub side and have more insights into what your social media traffic is doing after they click your posts/ads and land on the next page. Additionally, you can utilize specific landing pages for unique campaigns or use link extension coding (UTM link-building tool with Google Analytics4) to more precisely track your user data from a specific campaign link.
Tracking for Gym Advertisements
Similar to social media posts, the advertising platform should give you some advertisement performance metrics; however, that is still only part of the story. Knowing which advertisements are gaining traction in different markets and which ones are driving additional engagement or conversion after they interact or click on your ad is also a massive part of the equation of growing your business. Again, building out specific landing pages for the campaign (or even each specific ad) will help you track data more specifically. Along with the unique landing pages, you can again implement the URL extension UTM code to help distinguish traffic specifically from those links in your Google Analytics data.
Tracking for Non-Digital or Printed Gym Materials
While social media posts, emails, and advertisements all have the benefit of being digital and leaving a traceable footprint, many times, people assume printed materials cannot be quantified in such a manner. Although these materials have different physical properties in relation to interaction with your audiences, physical goods can still have elements of digital tracking built into them. Again, knowing what data you want to collect and why early on can help you out later when developing materials. Adding links to specific landing pages that include promotional information or curated landing pages rather than your generic business’ home page allows you to help channel and track this type of traffic to your website.
Additionally, by creating different pages or links for each type of printed material you are developing, you can get more granular with your data on the back end. This principle can also be applied even more specifically for smaller market segments or campaigns – it really just depends on how much you want that data since it would involve creating separate pages or links for the resource tracking as well as printing that resource out for each unique group since it would have a different link URL listed.
Reviewing Your Gym’s Campaign Data
Once you’ve implemented your tracking methods and have a system in place to collect the information you want insights into, the next step is to review and analyze those data points. Of course, the more data you have (time and quantity wise), the more insights you can gain; however, that should not stop you from jumping in and beginning. Once a campaign is live, you can start viewing data and user engagement as fast as your analytics systems can process them (you can typically access a real-time view of your campaign data in each program).
An important element to look for on the individual post/piece level is engagement: the things that are getting good interactions, clicks, and views with your audience. If you have multiple posts on your pages or previous pieces you’ve done, you can compare your current statistics against prior ones to see how well it is working in comparison. These insights against prior works should be an excellent benchmark to quickly test if your content’s elements are working. If the piece works, documenting what changes were made that led to this success is important for planning future growth on each channel with the specific targeted audience in mind.
As time passes, you may want more concrete insights as to what element changes in your marketing campaign parts actually work versus speculation. In these situations, you can run A/B tests where you make multiple variations of the same message and begin to test materials on the same audience against other pieces in the test set. Comparing the results can give you simple and fast answers on what resonates with your targeted audiences better on these minimal variable difference tests.
Another factor to consider when looking at your statistics is click-through rates (CTR). As you review the above statistics regarding engagement, know they are still important for making a splash. Still, those are only part of the story and can become a vanity metric if your click-through rate on the call-to-action is low. That being said, keeping an eye on what types of call-to-actions, deals, or offers work for your different audience types, channels, and sales funnel levels is critical for tying together a successful marketing campaign that leads to a healthy ROI.
Finally, watching your goal and conversion numbers will be the final tell as to the success of each campaign and the resources within it. While many times when we talk about the goals, it might be assumed that we are talking about a lead signing up for membership (conversion) or setting up a gym tour, it can also mean other things depending on the portion of the sales funnel you are working within. For instance, a top-of-the-funnel campaign element with a call-to-action might lead an early-stage lead to your fitness facility’s blog page, where they can sign up for your mailing list to keep up-to-date on blogs, deals, and gym news. This action of signing up would be considered a goal completion for this stage in the sales funnel.
By identifying the different goals for each stage of your sales funnel early on, you identify the key performance metrics (KPIs) that you will be judging the success of your campaign and elements on, enabling a more consistent basis for tactical decision-making in your marketing efforts.
Monitoring Your Gym’s Marketing Campaign Health
After you’ve set your campaign goals and identified KPIs, you have a strong basis for your data analysis. Going forward, these well-documented goals, alongside your data sets, can help guide you in the overall health of your fitness facility’s marketing campaign efforts as well. This monitoring can be done in several ways; however, watching the data comparisons and keeping an eye on the performance (live, short-term, and long-term) can give you an early alarm as to underperforming ads or even broken elements.
An example of a data-based alarm could be that an ad metrics page shows you are getting link clicks, but traffic is not showing up on the landing page website analytics. This discrepancy highlights a possible issue with the website link used in the ad, a potential web page issue, or something else that would require further investigation.
By utilizing your metrics early on and often, you can help promote campaign success by further investing in variations and resources that work and minimize lost opportunities or wasted potential from broken or missing resource elements. While it might take you a little time to get established and feel comfortable with managing your data, monitoring your campaigns, and gauging success, typically, the more time you spend with it and testing various methods, the more comfortable you will grow with making more intelligent business decisions and healthier marketing campaigns.
Random Testing of Your Fitness Facility’s Marketing Campaign Elements
Along with utilizing your data to track the systematic health and statistical performance of your gym’s marketing campaign pieces, it is also a good practice to test your elements manually on multiple systems. This doesn’t necessarily need to be a super formal process; however, having multiple web browsers and devices (or device simulators) to run through your campaign pieces yourself can let you test the processes to make sure everything works as it should on the different platforms. Additionally, manually testing your pieces and programming allows you to get a first-hand look and feel to the user experience of interacting with your marketing efforts. If you run into pain points in the process, you can help smooth it out either before it goes live or early on to help promote the best chances of success.
Making a Splash
The temptation of just launching a campaign can be strong, especially if you have been working on the pieces for a while and are excited to get them into the hands of your target audience. However, taking the time to ensure that you properly build in tracking with your processes and materials can allow you not only to monitor and analyze the success of the various pieces, but it may also help give you early red flags for underperforming or broken aspects of your gym’s marketing campaign. Finally, by manually testing and interacting with your processes and engagement points, you can get a simulated experience of what your ideal customers will be experiencing when engaging with your campaign at various points.