So, you’ve had a spectacular new website designed for your company and you couldn’t be happier with it. You’ve planned, strategized and implemented a high energy online marketing plan to publicise your website and guarantee it gets noticed in the increasingly competitive environment of the World Wide Web. Business might seem to be picking up as a result, but you can’t just blindly trust that your online marketing tactics are making a difference. You also need to know which techniques are proving more successful than others in driving traffic to your website as well as achieving the desired results your business requires. Measuring the success of your online marketing campaign is just as, if not more, important than commencing online marketing in the first place.
Not only will measuring the effectiveness of each of your marketing strategies help you to assess the overall results of the campaign, it will enable you to devise future plans based on what kind of tactics have proved most popular and profitable the first time around. Now you understand the importance of monitoring the results of your online marketing campaign, let’s take a look at how you can go about it.
There are numerous techniques used to measure the success of online marketing strategies. Part of your task will be choosing which are the most appropriate approaches for your website and business? The main techniques used to track the returns of online marketing include website traffic analysis software such as Google Adwords, WebTrends, Urchin or Webalizer that can be used to measure the number of times a page or file has been viewed and how referrals to your site were originally generated.
That’s the easy bit. To work out if your individual online marketing tactics have been a success for your particular business needs, you will need to consider the following questions:
What was the goal of your online marketing campaign?
Perhaps you wanted to increase sales on your ecommerce website, or maximise the amount of site visitors that turned into clients of your construction business. Either way, you will need to be clear about the goal of your online marketing campaign, both before you commence it and to measure its continued success.
Which ads, banners, links and other online marketing strategies achieved the highest referrals?
To work out how often you achieved your goal and which techniques were most successful at helping you accomplish it, you will need to analyse the results provided by your chosen web traffic-analysis software. This will show you where referrals to your site originated from and which ads generated the most value in terms of your goal.
How much did your online marketing cost you?
Consider how much profit was gained from your online marketing techniques against the amount you spent on them. You should assess each individual technique against its success in generating your goal result. This will help you to determine which particular online marketing techniques were most valuable in creating profit for your company and which were no use at all.
You already know the many benefits that online marketing can offer your business and, once you get the hang of measuring the returns of your marketing techniques, you can really perfect the effectiveness of your strategies.
By gathering web traffic data over time, you will not only be able to measure the effectiveness of each individual tactic, but also determine how well entire marketing campaigns are performing. In measuring the cost of each online marketing technique against its success, you will also become used to preparing and analysing strategic data that can be used in the long term to fine tune all of your future marketing efforts.
