Measuring Your Online Marketing Return
Why Calculating Online Marketing ROI Isn’t Always Simple Math
If there is one thing that we truly love and believe in as a web design and online marketing firm, it’s the most important internet statistic around: return on investment, or ROI.
As much as we love to talk and write about it, however, we often find that calculating it – and analyzing the results – is something that’s not always as simple as it ought to be. In theory, finding your ROI should be as straightforward as figuring out what you’ve invested into your online marketing plan, looking at what sort of revenue and profits came back to you, and then turning those numbers into a percentage.
While that exercise is often simple enough, there are a couple of things it doesn’t take into account. For one, when do you stop counting new sales? In some industries, customers might take months (or longer) for comparison shopping before they decide to buy. Cut off your internet marketing efforts too soon, and you could miss the big payoff down the road.
Another thing to consider is that the straightforward ROI calculation doesn’t always take factors like commitment and quality into account. If your online ads are only shown to 200 searchers before you pull the plug, then you might not have a big enough sample size to make any real conclusions. In the same way, it could be that a handful of small tweaks might have made all the difference, or that you simply needed a better creative team.
In fact, the deeper you get into ROI, the easier it is to become confused about what you’re actually looking at… or even what you should be looking for. With that in mind, here are a handful of quick tips for maximizing the return on investment you get for every dollar spent on internet marketing:
Take the right recommendations.
The first step to making a good investment is getting the right advice. That means working with an experienced, committed online marketing team and following some of their initial suggestions.
Make a plan and stick with it.
If your initial online marketing plan calls for three months of testing, then make a commitment to try that out. Unless things are going horribly wrong, exercise patience and stay the course – things might turn out better than you expect, and the information you’ll gain either way is valuable.
Make adjustments, not big changes.
Making an online marketing plan more profitable is usually a matter of changing things slightly on a rolling basis, not throwing everything out and starting over. You might be amazed at what can happen when you play with a single headline, image, or call to action.
Follow the results.
Over time, you’ll start to notice trends from your online marketing plan that lead you into more profitable directions. To get the biggest ROI possible, you have to look at the numbers and see what customers are reacting to.
It’s probably no surprise that maximizing the return on investment from your Internet marketing plan is a matter of making smart choices and then sticking with them for a while, but that’s a formula that hasn’t changed for a long time, and probably won’t any time soon.
Want to sit down and discuss your online marketing strategies? Let’s work together to lay out a plan.
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