Once your site has been promoted with the right mix of advertising, PR, and search engine marketing, you'll want
to measure performance to see how your marketing ROI stacks up. Marketers are looking for better returns from
their marketing campaigns.
A good way to measure returns is to examine the data in your Web logs, analyzing your traffic for clues to user
behavior. By analyzing behavioral data, you can fine-tune your site to serve customers better and improve your
own profitability.
It's important to know where your visitors go and to notice what they like or don't like. Traffic analysis can yield
information that improves marketing efficiency in two important areas:
- Making site changes to improve your conversion ratio, and
- Improving your marketing campaigns to achieve better ROI.
Analyze This
The beauty of online marketing is that your Web site gathers behavioral data from all visitors. You can find all the
information you need for optimal marketing strategies in your Web logs.
The best marketing campaigns are those designed to be measured, analyzed, and continuously improved. The
problem is that most laypeople don't know what to analyze or what actions to take as data is recorded. It's not
always easy to know what to measure and why.
Traffic Analysis Data
Web logs provide user activity information on your Web site traffic. Analyzing your Web logs will familiarize you with
the way visitors navigate your site. You can collect baseline information that tells you:
- Total Page Views
- Daily Unique Visitors
- Hourly Unique Visitors
- Total Visits
- First Time Visitors
- Repeat Visitors
- Daily Returning Visitors
Then you can look at averages such as:
- Average Page Views per Visitor
- Average Visits per Visitor
- Average Visit Length
- Average Page Views per Hour of this Day
- Average Unique Visitors per Hour of This Day
- Average Visits per Hour of This Day
E-commerce sites will find these statistics of value:
- Total Revenue
- Total Orders
- Total Unique Buyers
- Most Active and Least Active Time Period
- Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate
- First Time Visitor Conversions
- Repeat Visitor Conversions
- Buyer to Browser Ratio
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All this raw data resides in your Web logs, but it's hard to organize without traffic analysis tools. WebTrends by
netiQ is a popular analytical tool, and the information above was excerpted from its Executives "Top 10" Tables.
Additional traffic analysis tools can be found on download.com, including some low-end tools like HitBox,
LiveStats, Urchin. Many high-end tools with advanced functionality are available as well.
Site Changes to Improve
Conversions
What can you measure to identify the site changes that will improve your conversion ratio? This depends on the
nature of your site, whether it's an e-commerce site selling products and services, a media publishing content
site, or purely an informational site. Each site will have specific goals. The best way to determine how well your
site attracts and retains visitors to meet these goals is to identify all possible reasons why a user would visit your
Web site, such as:
- Gather in-depth information on products/services
- Look for email or phone contacts to ask questions about products/services
- Purchase products/services
- Compare pricing of products/services
- Check status of pending order for products/services
- Get more information or tips on using purchased products
- Look for customer service assistance
- Report a malfunction of online forms or shopping cart
- Register for newsletters, product updates, marketing brochures, white papers, etc.
- Research next-generation products
- Join an online community
- Read news headlines, industry news, business articles, etc.
- Research information on accessories for purchased products/services
- Check out new product offerings
- Troubleshoot problems related to purchased products/service
Once you identify the reasons why users visit your site, you can assign desired actions to visitor clusters and
follow their movements within your site to determine how successful you are in meeting your goals.
If you lead them to subscribe to a free newsletter and they fail to register, you need to find out why. You might be
asking for too much information. The form might not be user-friendly or functional. Maybe your description wasn't
compelling enough. Identify the roadblocks and take whatever action is necessary to improve your conversion rate.
Path navigation analysis can give you the information you need to make navigation easier and to adjust or
eliminate content to meet your customers' needs. These changes can increase conversions and customer
satisfaction.
Evaluating Campaign
Performance
There are several measures you can use to analyze the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. Each
company will have different objectives; therefore, the key performance measures will vary. Below are six basic
measures you can use for evaluating the performance of any marketing campaign.
- Total Unique Visitors - This is the number of visitors who responded to your campaign by coming to
your Web site.
- Total Desired Actions - This is the number of visitors who responded to your call-to-action. The
call-to-action depends on your objectives. It might be registering for a newsletter or trial, purchasing a product or
service, registering for a seminar, or subscribing to paid services, etc.
- Cost Per Desired Action - This is the cost of generating each desired action. It is measured by dividing
total campaign expense by the number of desired actions generated.
- Conversion Rate - This is the percentage of unique visitors completing your desired action. It is
measured by dividing total desired actions by the total unique visitors.
- Total Revenue - This is your total revenue generated by a specific campaign.
- Percentage ROI - Calculate the return on investment for each campaign by subtracting total costs from
total revenue, then dividing by total cost.
Once you've defined your performance metrics, you can use visitor behavior analysis to test the success of your
marketing message or the effectiveness of various offers. If you want to know how effective your search engine
marketing techniques are, you can compare your choice of various strategies:
- Site analysis and optimization
- Offsite development
- Linking strategy
- Paid inclusion
- Paid placement
Manual search engine submissions (Inktomi, Google, Lycos, AltaVista)
- Manual directory submissions (Yahoo!, Open Directory Project, LookSmart)
You might find that paid placement is less cost effective over time and can be dropped as paid inclusion and
manual submissions take hold. By making use of Web analytics, you can tweak your marketing campaigns for
increased conversions, lower acquisition costs, and improved ROI.
About The Author
Paul J. Bruemmer has provided search engine marketing expertise and consulting services to prominent American businesses since 1995. As Director of Search Marketing at Red Door Interactive, he is responsible for strategizing and implementing search engine marketing activities within Red Door's Internet Presence Management (IPM) services. Paul has provided search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine optimization (SEO) services to thousands of websites, including clients like Lexis-Nexis and NASDAQ. Paul is a well-known industry columnist, having written articles for ClickZ, iMediaConnection, Search Engine Guide, Pandia and MarketingProfs. He has also been a featured speaker at the Search Engine Strategies Conferences and at eComXpo. Paul can be reached at 619-398-2670 ext. 127 or pbruemmer @ reddoor.biz.
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