Most marketers would agree that the Holy Grail is the ability to measure the effect your efforts have on the bottom line.  Not only does this justify your job, but it also tells you which pieces of your marketing mix are working so you can make better decisions.

In the offline world it can be difficult to measure the effect your marketing has on sales. The joke in traditional advertising is that 50% of all your ad dollars are wasted – you just don’t know which half. Tricks like using unique phone numbers, coupons, or “call and ask for Holly” can help, but the reliability of these measures is far from perfect.  

The advantage of the Internet is that all behavior is trackable. With web analytics software you can measure the effect of all online marketing activities.  You can compare results to your web site averages and attribute ROI to each campaign. And you’ll know if a campaign is effective within 24 hours of its launch.  Every visit, click, downloaded file, form filled out, or e-commerce sale can all be tracked back to a specific ad campaign, email, web site, or creative element. 

Buy actual not potential

The ability to measure means you can “get what you pay for”. With offline advertising, you buy based on potential – a magazine has 30K subscribers for example. But how many open the magazine that month? To the page your ad is on? Read your ad? Then take action? The numbers dwindle quickly.

Online, you are buying based on actual views – show my ad to 30K people. Or better yet, show my ad to everyone, and I’ll pay for 30K interactions.

Tag and track behaviour

With the ability to tag URLs you can even track one step further. Not only do you know that X% of people clicked on your ad or hyperlink and got to your web site, but you know that Y% bought twice as much as the average visitor to your web site.

Now you have quantifiable evidence to justify your marketing dollar investment. You could never do this with traditional media.

Swap creative on the fly

Because feedback on your online campaigns performance is real-time, you can quickly react to your target audience’s response. Take advantage of this. Create 3 ads with slightly different messaging. Run each for a short period of time and see which gets the highest click through rate and run the winner for the remaining time. Try that with a billboard. (learn more about split testing)

Use the metrics

To get the most value you’ve got to use the metrics. If you’re not tracking your online performance, you’re missing an opportunity
- to learn more about your customers
- to make your web site work harder
- and to make it easy to ask your boss for a bigger marketing budget!

Learn more about incorporating online marketing into your organization