When online marketers evaluate their campaigns typically the gold standard of metrics is the click-through. There are three reasons for this:
they are simple to measure
(in the case of email campaigns) opens are not measured when text promotions are sent
they are not reliant on the quality of the website, call centre, etc.
The case for using click-throughs as a metric is thus quite strong. Unfortunately though, click-throughs can be misleading; they only tell half the story. As an example, would you rather optimise your marketing for click-throughs or sales? The answer is of course sales.
A good way around this measurement ambiguity is to track sales, leads or enquiries. For those businesses which with On-line Shopping carts, etc. you have effectively closed the measurement loop and can optimise copy and ad-spend for sales, and often assign a monetary value to these sales conversions. Many of us in less fortunate circumstances (those businesses that don't allow internet payment transactions) need to employ an indicative metric to gain a fuller picture of online marketing success.
In a service operation we would typically want to track leads or enquiries. There are two metrics we can use to optimise for leads and enquiries. They are:
Arriving at a “Contact Us” page, and
Filling out a “Contact Me” or enquiry form
You may ask, “How do I know whether my marketing is letting me down, or my website is letting me down?” Unfortunately, you don't. That is why online marketers often employ “click-stream” tracking. Briefly, click-stream tracking is the tracking of visitors through the pages of your website. Click-stream tracking enables you to find points of breakdown within your website, i.e. between web pages in your sales cycle. If there is a good conversion rate between pages in your sales cycle, then fault can typically be ascribed to marketing efforts and not website failings; and vice versa.
So in summary, to get a full picture of how marketing efforts are fulfilling objectives through media placement, copy, design and web navigation there are three metrics you need to look at, namely:
Click-throughs – Response off media placement
Click-stream conversion rates – Selling power of your website
Lead/Enquiry/Sale conversion – Complete success of campaign, ROI
To find out more about the Low Fat Internet Marketing services click here.
Please feel free to contact Darren Reardon on or go to the LOW FAT website – www.lowfat.co.za.
Related links:
For more information on Pay-per-click (Google Adwords) services click here.
For information on SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) please click here.
