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Measurable Marketing

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ByteMaster:
Measurable Marketing

As a kid, I was fascinated with science. Sure, at first it was the cool beakers and safety goggles I got to wear, but as I learned more I gained an appreciation for the process of the scientific method. The scientific method (observation, hypothesis, testing, observation of results and the subsequent theory) is just as at home in marketing as it is in the laboratory and it needs to be the backbone of your marketing strategy if you want consistent results. Measuring your campaigns can be done with a web analytics tool like Google Analytics, Web Trends, Piwik, Coremetrics or the many others that are available online.
Ultimately conversion to sale is the metric that matters most, however measuring your other data (i.e. bounce rate, time on page, etc) will help you improve your conversion to sale and in the end, your ROI and profitability. You should be measuring data in the following areas on your site: user interaction, traffic sources, and site metrics.

User Interaction

Understanding what your visitors do when they come to your site can help you understand how to improve your site and generate more sales and leads. Below are some of the key metrics that should be monitored for visitors hitting your site:

    Bounce Rate – how many of your visitors are landing on your site and then leaving without doing anything.
    Time on Site – how long are visitors staying on your site?
    Time on Page – are there particular pages that are holding the interest of your visitors better than others?
    % New Visits – how many repeat visitors are you getting?
    Pages/Visit – how many pages are your visitors viewing before they leave?

Measuring the metrics shown above is insightful, however you can get a more intimate understanding of what is going on with your site by viewing heatmaps and actual interaction on the site. CrazyEgg is a simple tool for viewing heatmaps, which show what areas of each page are getting the most clicks. This can help you to make incremental changes that will improve the clicks on your calls to action (i.e. Order Now, Contact Us, Add to Cart etc). More advanced tools, like ClickTale, take things a step further and will actually record user visits, so you can watch videos of a user’s mouse movements on your site. Now that is insightful.

Traffic Sources

Measuring where your traffic is coming from (i.e. Google, Twitter, blogs, forums, etc) and how each traffic source is interacting with your site can provide you with actionable data to improve your marketing campaigns, social media efforts and search engine traffic. At a minimum, you should be watching the following stats, so you can get a handle on the profitability of your marketing efforts.

    Top 10 traffic sources
    Unique visitors, bounce rate and conversion rate for each marketing campaign you are running (i.e. PPC, media buys, facebook)

Site Metrics

When we talk about site metrics, we’re looking at things like number of backlinks, mozRank, compete.com and Alexa.com scores. These are all external measures of your site’s popularity and key indicators of your site’s authority – particularly with respect to the search engines. As you build out your marketing campaigns, spread the word via PR and social media and share your company with the community, these metrics will improve. You need to be viewing these metrics on a routine basis (ideally daily) and keeping a log of marketing activities. This way, you can see what marketing activities lead to improvements in these metrics.

Measuring your marketing diligently and consistently is how successful marketing campaigns are built. Not only will you achieve a better ROI on your campaigns and activities, but something magical happens when you do this with persistence… you begin to see insights that you’ve never seen before – new ideas that can spark fresh campaigns and site improvements that lead to real improvements in your bottom line.

Author:  Josh Ewin
Director Marketing FortressITX Companies

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