One of the most important things that people should do if they are investing their money and time in digital marketing is to measure their return on investment or ROI. This is because the days of tracking performance by site visits, unique visitors and page hits is a distant memory. Although these basic metrics are easy to report and track, they fail to present marketing contributions to the bottom line. Due to this, marketers are now under more pressure than ever to prove their return on investment. Fortunately, there are several things that people can do to measure their ROI from using social media and SEO methods.
Always Know the Targets and Objectives
It is very important for people to consider the reasons why they are implementing any kind of marketing activity. This allows them to thoroughly understand how their business contributes to the bottom line. From there, they can set measurable, specific, realistic and attainable timed objectives that are related to business goals. The power of this very simple pre-launch work is that it immediately allows a marketer to understand if the channels that they are investing their money in are performing or not.
Use Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a an amazing free tool that Google provides. This allows marketers to decipher the amount of traffic that is coming to their website, the number of people who are inquiring or buying on their website, what online pages are performing the best, what traffic sources have the most conversions and even what marketing activities are performing best. This makes Google Analytics an effective tool that can help even the smallest businesses effectively track their ROI.
Track Everything
In order for people to get a clearer picture of which digital marketing channels are providing a positive return on their investment, it is very important for marketers to always ask themselves how they are going to track this before they launch a social media or SEO campaign. Today, it is very easy to track all kinds of online traffic sources. In addition, it is easy to integrate a wide range of digital tracking methods into their offline marketing.
eCommerce
If people have the capability to purchase a company’s services or products online through their website, marketers should make sure that they install an e-commerce module for their Google Analytics so that they are able to accurately track how much revenue every traffic source is generating for them.
Always Spend Money on Web Presence
People who are calculating the ROI for their marketing venture should always know that their web presence is very important. It is also one of the reasons why they should use an effective means of promoting their web presence such as Google AdWords. If a good portion of their target market is likely to visit them online at any stage of their purchase cycle, there is no reason to spend large amounts of money on expensive advertising campaigns if the business’ landing page, mobile site or webpage is not yet performing.
Use UTM Tracking
UTM tracking is a very easy and quick way for people to turn a distinct marketing activity into having its own traffic source that can be found in Google Analytics. All that they need to do is append a number of simple variables in the URL. From there, any online traffic that hits their website through this particular URL will be clustered into a traffic source that is independent within Google Analytics. By utilizing this tracking method, marketers have the capability to measure how much revenue and traffic that an email newsletter, a newspaper ad or even a single tweet or social media post has created for their business.
Use PPC Advertising
Pay per click or PPC advertising is a payment method where an advertiser only pays for the number of clicks that their advertisement receives. This advertising medium is very powerful because it allows a merchandiser to see exactly how much a page view costs and the total amount of revenue that it generates in return. At the same time, it gives marketers the capability to calculate how much a single click is worth to a business. Through this, they can optimize their bidding to make sure that they never have to pay more for a single click than what they will likely earn with it.
Change the Norm and Take Risks
In many instances, marketers continue to utilize methods that are not necessarily earning them any revenue because these strategies have worked in the past. If marketers are sufficiently armed with knowledge of technology like Google AdWords that are generating income for their business, it makes it easier to move their budgets towards things that are continually performing. However, it becomes very difficult for people to convince business executives to take a risk on a unique advertising medium if they do not possess this evidence.
Always Ask Questions
If businesses are outsourcing some of their advertising campaigns, they should make sure to ask questions about what their advertising dollars are achieving. Marketers should also remember that their supplier should be able to give an answer about how much return their advertising dollars have made for them and how they are coping with reaching their advertising objectives.
Always Integrate Messages
A number of the best advertising campaigns have an integrated online and offline message. This is because businesses know that 70 percent of people use SEO at some point on their purchase cycle. At the same time, they are well aware that if a TV advertisement does well enough with the target audience, people are more likely to look for the advertised product or service on Yahoo! and other search engines. This is also one of the reasons why businesses need more marketing than just a presence on the search engines where they are advertising. With this, the online message found on their website and the search engines will be able to reinforce their offline campaigns.
