Measuring the Success of Online Marketing Campaigns
- May 15th, 2009 by Steven Leung
Now that we’ve talked about the importance of using the right metrics, we can move on to what metrics you should use for measuring the success of your online marketing campaigns.
There are literally hundreds of statistics that you can gather and analyze. But not all of them are a wise use of your resources. We’ll look at the most popular metrics and show how they’ve evolved over the years to be a concise measurement of the success of your web presence.
Hits. In the 90’s, the most prominent measurement was hits but that was widely and quickly discredited because one person loading one web page will almost always generate more than one hit. That one person visiting one web page create a hit for that page plus every image loaded on that page.
Page Views. When laypeople say hit in this day and age, they mean a page view. Page views are a double-edged statistic. One the one hand, more page views can mean a reader is interested in your site. On the other, it could mean they’re lost and can’t find what they’re looking for.
It also begs the question, would you rather have a reader look at a hundred pages on your site and leave, or look at one page and become a customer? For business sites, the answer is always the same.
Time on Site. The same goes for the time a person spends on your site. Would you rather have a user spend 10 minutes on your site and leave, or 1 minute on your site and contact you?
Unique Visitors. Almost everyone says they want more visitors to their site, though, and estimating unique visitors is today’s most popular measurement of a site’s popularity and success. And marketers can easily use this metric to measure the popularity of their campaigns.
This metric is useful to a point, but it doesn’t say anything about how well your web presence is bringing your company leads or customers. After all, most unique visitors aren’t actionable: your sales force can’t contact them since you don’t know who they are. Most, but not all of them.
Conversion Ratio. You actually do know who some of your unique visitors are. They converted from being random unique visitors into your leads and customers. These are people where your website worked, and knowing how many visitors it took to get one lead is the single most important metric for your web presence.
This is called the conversion ratio, and to get more business, you can either increase the number of visitors to your site, or you can increase percentage of people who convert. The two require different techniques: one for increasing your traffic and another for optimizing your landing pages.
Return on Investment (ROI). The conversion ratio has a direct impact on when you see ROI for the campaign. At the beginning of the online marketing campaign, you measure ROI by the amount of business you would need to generate in order to pay for the campaign. Done correctly, a web presence never stops generating new leads or business.
The conversion rate comes into play when accelerating that ROI. When you know your conversion rate, you can estimate how long it will take to achieve a full return and increase the resources you put into it to accelerate that return.
You can build a referral cycle using referral bonuses and email marketing, which will ramp up your growth as your customer base continues to grow. As you get more customers, you build a greater referral base that can market for you.
These metrics are important because you can only improve what you can measure. Getting these statistics isn’t always as easy as it seems because of both technological and human factors. In our next blog post, we’ll show you ways to get these metrics and some of the traps to look out for.
Tags: Goal Setting, Prospect Conversion
You might also enjoy reading:
RSS Feed
Email to friend
Del.icio.us
Digg this
Reddit
Contact Us Now
Get The Advantage: Our Email Newsletter