Gauging Results of Your Online Marketing Efforts
Starting an online marketing campaign is only the first step in the process. It is a great idea to start an online marketing campaign if your target audience will use the Internet to research or purchase the products you sell or the services you offer but those marketing efforts may be a complete waste of time if you don’t evaluate the response to your Internet marketing. Each time you implement a change to your marketing strategy, you must evaluate the results of the change to determine whether it generated a greater profit for your business. It is critical because it can help you determine what is working and what is not.
Gauging the results of your Internet marketing efforts can be done in several ways. Customer surveys and embedded HTML codes are two of the most popular methods of evaluating the effectiveness of an Internet marketing campaign.
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Customer surveys: Customer surveys can be as simple or as complex as you like, depending on how much feedback you would like to receive. However, one of the most effective ways to learn how well your different marketing tactics are working is to include a question asking the consumer where they first learned about your products or services. This is important because if you discover that a great deal of your customers are learning about your products or services through a particular venue, it is a good indication that this method of marketing is working well for you.
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Embedding code: Embedding code into your advertisements for the purpose of receiving feedback is also a popular method of evaluating the response to your Internet marketing strategies. Advertisements can be coded so the business owner receives feedback each time an Internet user clicks through a particular advertisement. This is useful for letting the business owner know which of his advertisements are attracting the most attention. If the business owner is using two different designs for his advertisements he may discover one design is attracting more attention than others and may make the decision to convert all of the advertisements to a more effective style. Similarly a business owner who is running the same advertisement on several different websites may discover he is receiving more traffic from one website than others. He may also discover some websites are not attracting much attention at all. This would give the business owner an indication of which advertisements to cancel and which ones to keep running.
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Web traffic analysis – The response to an Internet marketing campaign can be evaluated by carefully reviewing website traffic statistics after implementing changes to the marketing strategy. This information is useful because an unusual spike in the amount of website traffic immediately after implementing a stage of the marketing campaign can provide positive feedback that the change was well received by potential customers. While this method of evaluating the response to an Internet marketing campaign can be effective, it is important to note that implementing multiple changes at once will make it difficult to determine which changes were the most effective. Therefore, if you plan to use website traffic as feedback to gauge how well your marketing strategy is working, it is important to only implement one major change at a time so that the changes can each be evaluated separately.
Conclusion
With any marketing campaign that you may run to assist your business, it is important to track the results of your Internet marketing campaign. This should be done on a continual basis so you can ensure that the strategies you are using are working. It can also help you to determine when a strategy is not working so that you do not continue to invest time and money on a strategy that is not beneficial to your business.
Any time you implement a new Internet marketing strategy or technique, it is worthwhile to study your website traffic reports and sales receipts carefully to determine whether there is a spike either in traffic or sales immediately after the marketing effort. For example, if you send out an e-newsletter to those who have requested additional information about your products or services, you may notice that there is an increase in traffic or sales soon afterward. This is a good indication that the e-newsletter was well received and effective. However, if there is not a marked increase in traffic or sales subsequent to the e-newsletter, it indicates that the marketing effort was not effective.
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Via LinkedIn Groups
Group: Step Into The Spotlight!
Discussion: How Do You Track the Results of Your Online Marketing Efforts?
By the goals.
To many this may be a skip it, post. But what I have trouble with is “marketing campaigns.” That implies a beginning and a set end. If you are aware of it or not, marketing is constantly going on. Especially on the small business end is a belief that advertising and marketing are the same. They are not. Advertising is a piece of Marketing. My bias is that everything in any business has components of Marketing in it. By most definitions the purpose of marketing is to bring a buyer and seller together so they can make an exchange. It can be a simple oversight like not flipping the closed to open sign.
Putting together something to send or a sign or what is appropriate for your company is the easy part. It is the measuring of the results. Combined with a medium company doing a second marketing test at the same time.
Usually they are far enough apart but it can get mixed. Where we see as a difficult choice is on when does it really end. A postcard attached to the refrigerator, is finally seen on the way to that store. That is lag time. Retail has it the easiest since the new promotion ends the prior promotion. The actual cost of the marketing effort is the cost to send it, redemption. The cost of touching 10,000 individuals is absorbed by the 5 that come in. for ease I cost $1 to send and print. The $10,000 is absorbed by the five who come in. Each of those five have to $2,000 each to pay for the one mailing. Then you also have the costs of the product or service. After all those variables are accounted for. Then you can let everything after the end it is residual sale or if you have been tracking customers who come in with an old promotion, you track that to determine an average tailing off.
There are a lot of ways, unfortunately not all are equal. Then the minute differences between companies Other details at this point I would want before advising more.
Email; Social Media Websites all have weaknesses and strengths, and cost more than what is being bragged now. Email must be developed and sent, then if an incentive to return is included the those have to be tracked. Email laws are also getting stricter.
Social Media take a lot of time. I know many younger people will bristle on that but why it is more expensive is since most promote a one on one connection. That alone takes it out of the effective way to grow your business.
By Howard Kaschyk
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Group: Small Business & Independent Consultant Network
Discussion: How Do You Track the Results of Your Online Marketing Efforts?
A code is assigned to each combination of source, and offer proposition. This code is linked to our order processing. This information is linked to the incremental marketing communication (outbound and inbound).
By James Johnson
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Group: Small Business & Independent Consultant Network
Discussion: How Do You Track the Results of Your Online Marketing Efforts?
Totally agree with James…and if you have store locations or a customer service/call center…integrate into the script how did you hear about this item or what brought you in today and ensure this information is captured within the system with some type of identifier.
This way you can measure, monitor and track if forecast versus actual was met, exceeded or did not achieve momentum.
The point is to connect every avenue the customer would touch can capture and report trends with a certain product, user type, location, initiative etc…
By Tonya Haynes
Via LinkedIn Groups
Group: Linked Business
Discussion: How Do You Track the Results of Your Online Marketing Efforts?
So many ways… social engagement, new business inquiries, influence… as a HubSpot partner agency, we keep an eye on the numbers on a weekly basis.
By Randy Milanovic
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Group: Music Business Professionals
Discussion: How Do You Track the Results of Your Online Marketing Efforts?
Before deciding what to track and how to track, establishing the strategic goals and objectives of the campaign must come first. The strategic goals and objectives will drive the creative – and what and how to track/measure.
By Stan Garber
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Group: Linked Small Business Innovators
Discussion: How Do You Track the Results of Your Online Marketing Efforts?
There are many ways to work to develop measurements on results.
Use google analytics to report on traffic counts and demographics on all new content additions. Record and analyze changes in likes and follows on social marketing sites. Measure increases in mailing list subscribers. These are measures usually related to a sales funnel process, all influencing sales. Usually the bottom line one has to watch is how these affect sales.
Most online activities can be measured with activity measurement tools like google analytics. But, online activity is not the only measurement which might be useful to a business trying to make improvements. Also, a tool like survey monkey can be used to measure things that google analytics cannot. I have created several customer opinion survey postcards for clients to give to their customers in order to understand how their customer feels about their business. So, another measure is know how their customer feels about their business.
One must know where they are at to figure out where they are going.
To start you must have a measure of each area of interest showing where you are at, before you can make interpretations on how efforts are having an effect on your sales funnel and sales. This is also true on customer opinion information. So, you start with a baseline of where you are at, and them make changes to get where you want to go.
By Brad Curtis
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Group: Fans of Mashable
Discussion: How Do You Track the Results of Your Online Marketing Efforts?
Not only is it important to track an online marketing campaign, it really doesn’t make sense not to since it is all digital and nearly tracks itself. Of course, the best tool is Google Analytics. It is actually almost scary how much data and info you can get with running Google Analytics behind your website. Also, nearly all social network platforms offer business accounts “insights”. FB has done an amazing job of turning their insights up a notch. Other great tools include HootSuite and similar companies which allow you to compare several social platforms and extract spreadsheets for comparing/compiling data. Then you have your survey tools such as SurveyMonkey.com which allow you to engage with clients or potential clients with direct feed back from willing survey participants. To increase participation think of a way to reward each person taking the survey…it doesn’t have to be of value to you as much as it should be of value to the person thinking of taking your survey!
Keep in mind people, in general, are always more willing to do anything when there is even potential for reward. I do most of my online campaigning via social networks, in particular the “Big Four”: LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook Fan Page (sometimes Profile, depends on business), & Google+. Keep in mind all online marketing, besides the overall goal of generating revenue, should push clients or potential clients to your company website so you get the advantages of Google Analytics and a central hub for all online info, selling, buying, promoting, etc.
For example, a favorite of mine is a social media campaign where all those who have “liked” your FB business fan page are eligible to play, and you then you ask trivia questions. (This campaign is geared to increasing FB fan page likes and customer participation.) Depending on your business and type of trivia, may or may not be relevant to your business but should be interesting and engaging, you will create rules saying your company will like the comments of the first 5, maybe 10, correct responses to the trivia. Each person who receives a like now knows they were one of the correct responses. So now you put each name into a drawing for a prize of your company’s choice ( of course, it’s great to get a willing business to donate something in exchange for advertising via the campaign). Run the campaign for a business week and post up to three trivia questions Monday through Friday. Announce a winner on Friday or Saturday from the drawing. You will gain likes because people love games and just a chance at winning.
The exact details will vary from industry to industry but the principle is the same: gain attention through top-of-mind-awareness. These people may not need you now but will remember you when they need someone from your industry plus it’s very easy to track all the info and participation by the FB fans.
Hope my few cents is helpful!
By Sam Blanda
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Group: Business Development – The Missing Link between Marketing & Sales
Discussion: How Do You Track the Results of Your Online Marketing Efforts?
Record and analyze to guide continuing “trial and error?”
By James Johnson
Via LinkedIn Groups
Group: Business Development – The Missing Link between Marketing & Sales
Discussion: How Do You Track the Results of Your Online Marketing Efforts?
The best way to do this is to change one factor every time… Lots of businesses split test based on completely different marketing materials, this is a mistake, you should take an identical piece and change only one thing, maybe headline, test it, analyze results, keep the one that better convert and then make a copy of that one and maybe change the image. Rinse and repeat,, wonderful thins about online marketing, you can measure everything!
By Gabriel Collignon
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Group: Entrepreneurs in Social Media
Discussion: How Do You Track the Results of Your Online Marketing Efforts?
We’re currently using Raven Tools for tracking and tweaking the reports.
By Darian Kovacs
Thank you for great write-up Mike. Internet Marketing can be such a daunting task if you don’t know what you are doing!
I have been in Internet Marketing now for 3 years and it’s only because of articles like this one, which explains things in detail, that I was able to equip myself with the right tools to become successful online.
So thank you very much 😉