Online Marketing is generally divided into three types: Pay per Click, Search Engine Optimization, and Social Media Marketing. Once you have an online marketing strategy put in place, the only way to know for sure if those marketing efforts are wisely directed is to measure.
There are many analyzing factors to be mindful of. Use analytics to discover the keywords and pages that are driving your traffic. Analytics show where visitors who land on your page come from, their sources, what key words sent them to your site, how many pages they looked at while on your site ,and the amount of time they spent on your site. After the data is collected it must be analyzed to be able to improve marketing efficiency.
You will need to use a specific period of time that relate to your marketing efforts and check the traffic volume in relation to your goal. Each time you check the numbers use that same specific period of time, generally 30 days. Be careful with holidays and weekends; these dates may alter the accuracy of comparisons. Also, if your website’s traffic generally varies by season, consider comparing the current time period to the same time a year earlier instead of the time period directly before this current time. December 2010 as compared to December 2011 might be more useful than comparing November 2011 to December 2011 because the general public tends to spend and shop more during the holiday season.
Measuring web traffic can speak to the popularity of your page, however, more important than tracking hits on your site is to track the conversion rate. Your conversion rate is the percentage of visitors that complete a desired action. This can be calculated by dividing the Visits by the Number of Goal Achievements.The higher your conversion rate is the more likely it is that your current online marketing strategy is working.
To bring all of this analysis together, look at what you spent in order to achieve your goal. Measure the value of each conversion in light of the cost of the marketing that generated the conversion.
Example 1: Sale X generated $500. It came from an Adwords ad that you spent $10 on clicks for before you got that sale. So you spent $10 to get $500 in business.
Example 2: You received 100 visits after implementing a new Adwords ad. Those visits cost you $10. You didn’t generate any new sales therefore, this Adwords ad did not work.
By gathering this kind of data you can measure and analyze the effectiveness of your current online marketing strategy and those in the future to come.