What’s the Best Way to Measure Your Online Marketing Success?

June 4th, 2012No Comments »

There are a lot of differences between traditional print based marketing and the relatively new concept of online marketing. Some marketers say that most of the old techniques still apply to online marketing, while others are of the opinion that there is virtually no overlap between the two. Even with the differences being what they are, there’s still one important thing that hasn’t changed: You always have to measure your marketing campaign.

Introducing New Metrics

Surprisingly enough, most of the metrics used for measuring your marketing campaign’s success haven’t changed all the much. We’re just calling them something different now. Whereas in the past you may have a questionnaire in your store asking “How did you hear about us?,” Now you check a program like Google Analytics to see what their referring site was. It’s the same concept just put into a different context.

For the longest time, the final measure of the success of a marketing campaign was based around the sales leads. The more leads a particular method brought in, the more effective it was. Conversion was important too, but that rested more on the quality of the products, along with the price, than it did on the marketing aspect. Marketing brings people in, and it’s up to the store to close the sale.

As you do this online marketing thing for awhile, eventually you start to realize that things haven’t changed all that much. We just use different words. Let’s look at three specific types of online marketing and see how they’re measured.

Email Marketing

You send out an email to your subscriber list, and then measure the number of people who visit your website from a link in the email. This is called “Click-thru rate,” or CTR, which is a term we’ll use a lot. In the context of a marketing effort, the people who click through onto your website are the leads generated by that campaign.

Online Ads

Ads are placed around on websites much the same way you might put up a billboard in real life. In the real world, someone may see that billboard and then decide to visit your store. Online, the person would see the ad, click on it, and be redirected back to your website. It’s the exact same principle, it just happens much, much faster. Just as with email marketing, you measure the CTR of your various ads to see if they’re effective where they are, or if you should move them to different websites.

Search Engine Results

Somebody searches for a specific keyword and your website pops up in the results, along with nine others on the same page. If they click your website link, that counts as a referral from the search engine. You can track which search engines are bringing you traffic, as well as which keywords are bringing your page up in the results. When you start receiving a lot of traffic from a specific keyword, you know that campaign was successful

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