Measuring your Return on Investment
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Online advertising has grown extensively over recent years with the use of paid search (Google Adwords), banner ads and search engine optimization to try to build brand recognition and sales. |
Once you have a website, tracking the Return on Investment (ROI) of your site and online advertising must be of paramount importance to achieving online success. This may sound cliché but many websites are created with no set objectives to measure the effectiveness of your online presence through their websites.
To help you measure your Return On Investment, you need ask yourself the following questions:
What are your site objectives?
Without clear site objectives, it is easy to lose sight of why you built your website in the first place. In order to establish your site’s ROI and the value of your online presence, you must understand what ROI is and the objective metrics to measure on your site.
Your website may have many goal metrics that you can measure to help determine the value of your online investment. Dependant on your industry, these goals may include:
- Lead generation
- Visitor interest on a specific page on the site
- The downloading of content on the site
- Driving visitors to purchase online
Whatever the goals, identify and define how the goals play out on the site.
How will you measure your on-site activity?
There are many tools that one can use to measure website performance and other on-site metrics.
Google Analytics (Free online software from Google) is probably the best example of a comprehensive, free and user-friendly tool that can be used to measure on-site metrics such as:
- Number of website visitors – per page visits, Pageviews, bounce rate, length of visit and traffic source
- Top performing keywords
- Top performing content
- Goal conversions and site event tracking (number of objectives or goals completed)
What is each goal value?
In order to a get clear view of the worth of each goal on your site, look at the following important factors:
- Landings on a specific page or file
- Where your referrals to the site or page originated
- Conversions from any particular
- The source of each conversion
For example:
Determine how many site leads convert to customers by taking the number of people that land on a specific goal page compared to the number that complete the goal, and calculate the rate of conversion.
What Did It Cost?
To bring it all together, you need to assess how much you spent to achieve your goal. Whether you have invested solely on the building of a website or continued to run a Paid Search campaign, you need to assess the cost of your investment compared to what you received in return. This may be a number of leads, brand awareness contacts or votes received that you attain (whatever goals are associated with your website).
