With internet marketing very much ‘du jour’ and most small businesses taking advantage of the new and cheap ways to promote themselves online, its easy to forget that you still need to measure your return on investment (ROI). Internet marketing brings much better value than traditional marketing which can be difficult to measure, but there’s no excuse for not measuring online marketing. There are so many free tools available, that you should soon see where your money is best spent in no time.
1. Google Analytics – even if you’re running a server side web stats package (e.g Webalizer or Livestats), you can still run Google Analytics alongside them. Google Analytics has a built in conversion tracking tool that you can set up to measure particular actions people take on your website e.g subscribing to a newsletter, tracking sales, completing an enquiry form. If you measure these actions on your site, you can find out exactly where those visitors came from that led them to take these actions, e.g which keyword in a search engine led to the sale, which link pointing to your site, even if they came to your site directly – for example, this could be an indication that a PR campaign may be working or that all your networking efforts are paying off.
2. Google Website Optimiser – this is another free tool that Google provides, enabling businesses to measure variations of a web page and see which layout or text works best. For example, if you’re re-designing your site and want to test new layouts first, or if you’re creating a landing page for a specific campaign. Once you know which layout visitors prefer, you can alter your copy or designs to reflect what’s working best to produce sales.
3. Google Adwords conversion tracking / Microsoft Adcenter conversion tracking – both Google and Microsoft’s pay per click platforms provide free conversion tracking that allows you to measure when someone takes an action as a result of your paid ads. So you can measure e-commerce sales, enquiry forms etc and know that those particular visitors came from the pay per click if they complete the action you’re measuring. This obviously doesn’t include sales or enquiries by phone or email as a result of the ad.
4. Good old pen & paper – if you have staff answering the telephone, then it’s worth making sure that each time an enquiry is made over the phone, the caller is asked how they found out about the company. People don’t always remember but the more information you can get the better. You can also add a field to any enquiry form you have on your website that asks the same question.
