How to Measure Success?
Modulus Media Toronto // Website Design Toronto, Internet Marketing, Design, Programming, start-up business, small business, startup, quality
Remember: Don't panic, rankings fluctuate Don't forget content is king, but popularity is queen This is an on-going process… |
The easiest way to know if your Search Marketing is working is to check your balance sheet. If it's working, your sales figures will be the best indicator :-). Here are some common things to check during your Search Marketing campaign:
Check your statistics and analytics reports: Compare these number against previous months and years to determine if it's successful.
- Unique visitors - will tell you how many unique visitors you've had (this is good for measuring new business).
- Return visitors - knowing this will help you understand that you have repeat customers
- Page views - indicates which pages are most popular, and which are not (then we fix the unpopular ones)
- Conversions - this is a number of how many people are doing exactly what we want them to, for example, if we want them to click on a button, enter their email address, fill out a form, refer a friend, and of course buy a product
- Abandonment rate - a very helpful statistic that tells you how many people abandon their shopping cart before paying. High rates of abandonment mean that you have serious checkout problems that need to be investigated and fixed.
Financial Statements:
- The #1 indicator of the success of any campaign will be seen on your bottom line. Compare your sales volume versus previous months and years to get a percentage of the increase. If you are seeing more than 15% growth you're above average. With Search Marketing you can target one product and see the effects that this has on sales before jumping into spending the money optimizing all of your products.
Regularly monitor your ranking to avoid over optimization:
- With many keywords we can start ranking within the first month. If we are ranking top 5 based on last month's efforts, we should suggest targeting another keyword and/or put the efforts into another strategy.
Above all else, set your goals:
If you want your management team or board to fund your Search Marketing proposal, you will need to show them your goals. It's not unrealistic to start out with a mini-campaign ($2,000 - $5,000) before requesting budget for a full blown campaign ($20,000 - $50,000).
What if you knew with a little extra effort we can actually "pre-qualify" these leads!! Consider that the traffic coming to your site are actual leads... but when you dig a little deeper, you find out for some reason NO ONE IS BUYING. This means that you have a low (or non-existent conversion strategy). Even if you are not selling things directly through your website, we can track customers and their buying habits.
We work through clearly establishing conversion strategies, such as:
- 15% increase in monthly sales
Remember:
it's not just the leads you are looking for, you are looking for qualitifed buyers that want to do business with you.
- 10% lift in demonstration registrations
- 35% increase in online course registration
- 20% increase in subscription renewals
- 50% increase in banner ad clicks
- Fewer customer service calls
- 100% increase in traffic to the website
- Increase in repeat visitors
20% decrease in cart abandonment rates
- Push customers to your "buy now" product pages
- Send customers to fill our your RFP form
- Direct customers promotion pages to "buy now" or "submit your email address"
- Promote contests
- Asking for referrals "refer a friend"
- Even direct your print campaigns to personalized url's to track the results and present specific promotion pages for each recipient (ie) send out a post card and make the promotion code the name of the recipient. On your site you will be able to track who entered the promotion and even give each person a unique page that fits their profile (ie) products that are blue and fuzzy feeling!
We hope you can see the benefit of tracking conversions. Basically, you need to know where your traffic is coming from and how effective your advertising is working.
The ability to catapult your business into the world wide web makes investing in a solid search marketing campaign vital to your success. Not only do you gain unprecedented exposure, the results are tracked in real time. It's not only about getting traffic to your website, it's about converting this traffic into customers... which means you need a professional website.