Websites lose 40% - 60% of their Visitors on the 1st Page!
ROI. Return on Investment. Quite simply, what’s the bottom line?
If you’ve just shelled out mega bucks on a marketing campaign you expect more than some “smoke and mirrors†rhetoric about the impact of your efforts. You want solid, con- crete proof and the assurance that your investment was not in vain.
Think back to your last marketing blitz. What did you do – distribute a press release? Write a feature article? Secure airtime on the local network? Perhaps you sent out a direct mail piece or put up a billboard on the interstate. Surely you put in some initial research before the campaign, estimating the number of highway travelers per day that might see your ad- vertisement or considering the demographics of a particular magazine or a specific viewing audience. While this information provided a basic estimate of potential impact it by no means guaranteed sales generation. So how did you measure the return on investment for your traditional marketing campaign? Did you find that data was readily available for cal- culating the dollar amount of revenue produced, or did you end up feeling as if you were “grasping for strawsâ€, feeling the pressure to validate your actions but not finding the sup- porting evidence to do so?
If so, you’re not alone.
What if there was a way to launch a marketing campaign where real-time data would abound, giving you concrete figures to analyze and manipulate in order to assign ROI pro- duced by your efforts? The key is unlocking the wealth of information hidden behind the scenes of your web presence, understanding implications of key metrics and then using these insights to determine impact as well as opportunities for future improvement.
While traditional marketing tactics have been a staple of any business growth campaign for decades, the changing times and technology has given us new avenues for expanding client-base and significant opportunities to measure our success.
Think about this: Say you spend $10,000 on a direct mail campaign. You have invested time, money and resources into conceptualization, design, content writing, printing and mailing among many other incidentals that cropped up along the way. But a month later, do you have any quantitative data that speaks to the bottom-line impact of your efforts? Honestly, do you even know if your direct mailer made it to the customer’s mailbox, and, if it did, was it ever opened or quickly tossed into the trash? This is a common dilemma with traditional marketing channels and poses a problem for marketing professionals constantly required to “prove themselves†because company management is less interested in esti- mates and theories and more focused on stone cold fact. Chances are, unless you included a promotional code or coupon, a registration card or some other form of response, there is no way to identify who your ad is reaching.
Now, imagine sitting down with the powers that be after launching an electronic marketing blitz and giving them highly-specific data about who visited your site, how they got there, when they were there, what they were interested in and much more. What a wealth of in- formation to determine the effectiveness of this campaign but also to target future commu- nications for maximum optimization!
There are a number of ways to promote your company online, including banners, links, search engine optimization, E-Mail, industry forums, social networking and more. These methods provide you the ability to track conversions and determine which marketing chan- nels provide the most revenue for the least cost. There is a plethora of real-time data avail- able and the trick is to apply analytics to pinpoint valuable insights to determine the criteria for a successful marketing program.
If you take a look at your site’s log file, you’ll find plenty of data. But data is nothing more than a lot of numbers and figures if you don’t have the means to interpret their value. The depth of information can be intimidating and this is why many companies choose to do nothing, letting opportunity slip through their fingers. The good news? It doesn’t have to be this way.
It is important to establish a scorecard with actionable objectives and key performance metrics that keep outcome and accountability in focus. The following is a comprehensive list of the top five metrics every company should track and the means to understand the analytics behind each.
What money has been invested? Where do you need to spend more? It sounds quite simple but there are many components that can be easily overlooked, and deter mining an accurate ROI must include all areas of expense. First, there is the cost of initial setup of your technology infrastructure. Then, consider the operational costs associated with the website and other channels of e-presence.
A growing business will require more data storage, bandwidth and design costs – these all factor in to the bottom line.
Costs incurred under typical operation could include graphic design, content writing, advertising, customer service and point of sale fees. Take into account the estab- lished number of visitors to the site per month when choosing to spend money on search engine optimization and/or pay-per-click advertisements.
Who are you trying to reach? Customers are your bread and butter and it is essential to understand their behavior in order to win their business...and their loyalty. Such traffic measurements allow companies to determine the effectiveness of their online presence by offering a detailed examination of how customers interact with their site. Click-through rate is the number of users clicking on your ad or webpage divided by the total number of impressions and is a critical measurement in deter mining the success of a marketing campaign. Page views count the times visitors ac cess a page on your site; Visits occur when a customer navigates through several pages on your site; unique visitors are individual customers visiting your site during a designated timeframe.
Assessing the amount of new visitors to your site is critical as every growing business needs a constant supply of potential new business. The data can also tell you the geographic proximity of visitors and this can be helpful to more strategically target future marketing efforts. Understand your traffic sources - they should be highly diversified in order to maximize performance. Pay attention to referring domains and URLs to get a better understanding of where your traffic is generated as well as potential customers’ similar interests. When you truly understand the people interested in your business, it is then you can most precisely tailor your marketing efforts and improve profitability.
How much are you willing to pay for each customer? What is their immediate and long-term value? Many companies focus mainly on the immediate value of a client derived from conversion rates and generated revenue over an established time period. Understanding the factors included in the compilation of your marketing campaign and directly linking customer behavior to that activity is a valuable tool in determining influencers and targeting future marketing efforts.
What happens if a particular customer returns to your website months down the road to make another purchase or even buys offline? Shouldn’t this be included when determining ROI? In order to estimate the true ROI per customer, you must also consider their lifetime value (LTV), a highly speculative figure based on future purchases and interests.
Examine average purchase amounts (in dollars) and the average number of pur- chases per year to gain a deeper understanding of customer value. Know the profit margin on your products and services to determine money made on each transaction.
Are you delivering on your promise of customer satisfaction or sabotaging your own marketing campaign? How many times have you visited a website to be completely repulsed by what you found there – dry content, an irritating heavy use of flash, and broken links? Did you immediately leave the site never to return? Could this be hap- pening at your site? So many companies make the mistake of not investing in their site while still funding search marketing. And though search marketing is well worth the expense, what do potential customers feel when they are drawn in only to be let down by a sloppy and hard-to-navigate site? First impressions are everything and if your site isn’t up to par, the new business opportunity is as good as gone.
Assess data of key web performance metrics to delve into customer engagement and discover the quality of their interaction with your site as well as potential stumbling blocks. The landing page identifies the beginning of the customer experience – did they stay on your site or immediately leave? An immediate departure from the site is known as the bounce rate and this analytic speaks volumes to the customer’s first impression of your site. If a high percentage of visitors are abandoning ship from the get go, this indicates a major problem that needs your attention. Landing page data can provide useful insights in optimizing structure and linking systems to create more “buzz†around your site. Time spent, pages viewed, click density and repeat visitor analytics detail customer engagement levels and pro vide marketing professionals with strong indication of brand interest.
What are you getting in return for your investment? Does the result surpass the in put? This is the mother of all online marketing metrics because it hits you squarely in the pocketbook. Impressions and site traffic are great but useless unless the visitor takes the bait on your call to action, whether that is creating an account, downloading a whitepaper or, even better, making a sale. The conversion rate is the number of successful completions of specific activities by visitors to your website, or, more simply, the number of visitors moving from “lead†status to “customer†status. In order to most accurately calculate ROI, it is important to know the estimated number of new clients as well as an estimated annual profit per customer.
Are you making the most of your online marketing activities and realizing the maximum re- turn on your investment? If you want to be competitive in your industry, not knowing is not acceptable. Start monitoring customer behavior today and position your business for exponential GROWTH!
TruePresence is changing the rules of the web. Now businesses just like yours can harness the power of the Internet to find, get, and keep customers. No more do-it-yourself solutions or vendors with limited resources.
TruePresence lets you do it all:
Work directly with your local TruePresence office to develop the online mar- keting strategy that makes sense for your business. Our national team of ex- perts manages the fulfillment of each solution, complete with easy-to-use analytical tools and on-hand technical support, giving you a powerful online presence that can generate measurable results.