Internet Marketing Strategies – know what it is you want!
Posted by Mercury Thread | Posted in Affiliate Marketing, Banner Advertising, IMJUK, Internet Marketing, Pay Per Click, Search Engine Optimization | Posted on 22-08-2007
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OK the first stage on any Internet Marketing strategy – and don’t leave this up to your agency – is to know what you want to achieve. Before you know what you want you need to know what you have – you need to know where you are before you can plan how to get to somewhere. And in Internet Marketing knowing how to guage the performance of your campaign(s) is centrally important.
Know your Performance Indicators
You need to know the following before you go anywhere:
- Unique Visitors Per Month – The number of individual users who visit your website in a given month. If you can get this as an average over a couple of months or a year even better.
- Number of Sales Per Month generated from the website
- Conversion Rate – How many visitors do you need to make a sale – Divide your unique visitors by the sales
- New Vs Returning Visitors – If your internet marketing campaign is to get incremental sales you want to see the new visitors increasing – new visitors turn into new sales (slight over simplification but will do as a starter for ten)
- Average order value – how much does an average sale from your website generate (total sales value/number of sales)
- Average monthly spend on your business
- Current Cost Per Acquisition – How much it costs you currently to make a sale (monthly spend/number of sales generated)
We’ve built a spreadsheet where you can input some data and start uncovering the relationship between the variables relevant to your website. Download Excel spreadsheet
Prioritise your Performance Indicators by Importance
If you have all these your gonna have a good start. The next stage is to place these in importance order for your business:
- If you sell banner advertising number of visitors is the core goal
- If you want to improve profitability conversion rate is going to be high up
- If you have sales targets then sales value, average order value and
conversion rate matter most
Get to know these inside out before you even approach any agency or company about getting Internet Marketing. Know the relationship between each of these variables and you’ll start in a position of power when you speak to an agency and when you get started you can start tracking your campaign with your own performance indicators and ensure you maximise the return on your investment in Internet Marketing.
Nice post Mike, but I’d just like to add by saying that even if you don’t have any ecommerce site these golden rules still apply – simply change the word “sales” for actions.
Go through your site in it’s entirety and make a note of all the actions a visitor to it can take, be these downloading or requesting a product brochure, emailing/filling in a contact form, requesting a quote or any other form of discernible action. If you find most of your business is conducted over the phone, install an instant callback feature and use a different number on your site than is in your offline communications. Hell, even try an IM client – anything that can be tracked, logged and documented should be!
Once you have this data you can calculate the rates at which one action leads to another, allowing you to tailor your marketing message and site priorities accordingly. Et voila! Results improve, the sun comes out, and you dance the merry dance of a happy human being.
The next challenge is of course tying this in with all your offline marketing data, but that’s another post entirely… watch this space!
Good point for sales you could have email sign ups, enquiry form completion etc. So I guess Richie is right may be action or goal completion and could be more exact – TBH was trying to limit the variables being analysed easily and next article ws going to explain how to use this system to track all actions on the site and later articles were going to look at tracking other website variables to improve your specific channels – and I’ve just realised that my Download link is missing will get it up ASAP so you can get the wee spreadsheet thing too – Cheers Richie
A good informative post with a couple of well thought out comments especially from Richie. Nice weblog.
Cool review discussing your Performance Indicators for a succesful Internet Marketing campaign! Thoroughly enjoy your interesting posts!
Outstanding blog post about your Performance Indicators for a succesful Internet Marketing campaign! Thoroughly love this write ups.