If you are like many other small businesses in the age of social media, you may be spending money across multiple different online advertising platforms. In my experience, most small businesses will spend some money in a few different places, but they rarely track their results to see what is getting them the most bang for their buck.

You can use analytics to track the success of each spend, and then tweak your allocations to increase the effectiveness of your marketing spend. Perhaps your Google Ad words campaign has the highest CTR (click-through-rate), but then also has the highest bounce rate (which is when visitors leave your website without engaging in multiple pages). Should you spend more on Google Adwords because it drives people to your site, or focus your energy on Facebook which has higher user engagement once they actually reach your website?

Situations like this are when professional marketers can come in to help and actually save you money in the long run by setting up a more effective campaign, showing you where you can improve, and provide data to back up recommendations.

Tracking social media is complicated to set up, but can save money in the long run for businesses if they know how to use it correctly. Most importantly, businesses should set up KPIs, or key performance indicators, which will help them look at what they want to achieve and assign a measurable goal to it. Click here to learn more about KPIs. By setting specific goals, then the businesses can track, over time, how well their campaign is performing, and then test and tweak it constantly to achieve the best results.

Throwing money at advertising might work in the short run, but will not provide the best results or return on your investment. Make sure that you have an idea in mind of what you would like to achieve, and then a plan to make it work. Once that is done, you can revisit it every month or so to look at the performance and then try to find ways to improve.