1. Top Story

Does Your Online Marketing Pay?

By Kathryn Jones
Measuring your marketing efforts is important. You invest your time and money in launching an online marketing campaign. To make sure you've made a good investment, you need to monitor its progress. If the return is low for one campaign, move your efforts into a more promising prospect.

In the online arena, clicks, visits, conversions and sales reports immediately and objectively measure marketing results. Here are five simple ways you can track the results of your Web-based marketing campaigns.

1. Monitor traffic.
   The first step to measuring a website's success is counting total visits per day, week, month or year. Invest in software that measures how many different visitors view your site, how long they stay and how many pages they visit. An easy way to calculate a campaign's success is to subtract the number of visits before its launch from the number of visits reported a few weeks into the campaign.

2. Track click paths.
   Take a psychological approach to measurement by tracking visitors' paths as they navigate through your website. If you can figure out how or why people went from one page to the next, you'll develop a profile of your customers and their interests. Learning how a customer's mind works enables you to create advertising campaigns that captivate visitors and increase sales.

3. Increase the number of links to your site.
   It's a simple equation: Incoming links equal visits to your site. In addition to visitors, search engine spiders follow links to your site and record data. A high number of incoming links positively influences your search engine rankings. However, it is crucial to keep your eye on those links. If you find a broken one, have it fixed immediately to maintain your stellar ranking.

4. Perform search engine optimization.
   Find out which search engines send the most people to your site. Track the keywords that lead directly to your site. If you can determine which keywords people type into the search engines, you can use those same keywords in your online advertising campaign.

5. Measure your online marketing return of investment.
   With a little math, it's easy to rate how well your advertising campaign is going. Start by determining which Web page marks the fulfillment of your website's goal. Usually it's the “thank you” page at the end of a transaction or email list subscription.

For ecommerce websites:

• Count how many people reached the “thank you” page at the end of their transaction.
• Divide that number by the money you spent on your campaign.
• Now, find the average sale amount per customer.
• Compare the average sales total with the marketing cost per customer.

Now it's clear whether your marketing campaign paid off.

You can measure email list subscriptions in two ways:

• First, you can measure how much you pay to acquire a subscriber. Simply divide the number of subscribers by the dollar amount you spent on your subscription campaign.
• Or you can measure the campaign against sales, as described above.

Measuring the success of your online marketing campaign is inexpensive and painless when you have the right software to help you. Hostway's Web Analytics tool gracefully guides businesses through each of these steps for only $5 per month. For more information, click here. 

Feature story provided by MidwestBusiness.com.

2. Market Your Business with Streaming Media

If an online marketing effort isn't working, it's time to try something new. According to a recent report by Forrester Research, more than half of all adults watch video online. Learn how to take advantage of a simple, cost-effective way to add video to your website.
Get the full story.

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4. Smart Tip:

Use Cookies to Monitor Banner Ads

When running a banner ad campaign, place a cookie in the ad to track which placement resulted in visits. You will see which websites sent the most and least traffic to you and adjust future purchases accordingly.