Understanding Online Marketing: How to Tell If Your Online Marketing Plan is Working For Your Business

If you’re wondering if your online marketing plan is working, then this article is for you.

Before you can know if your internet plan is working, you must first have a way to track on a regular basis your marketing campaigns for your business. There are several metrics that you can use on your website or blog that will let you know how well you are doing. Then you can decide what needs to be changed or what you need to stop doing altogether.

There are several metrics that I use in my business and/or have set up successfully for my clients. I’ve put together a few of these metrics that you should know in order to analyze and successfully observe your online marketing campaigns and plans.

1. Google Analytics – this is a free service that provides basic analytical tools for SEO and marketing purposes. It tracks the number of visits to your site, pageviews, average time spent on your site, referring sites and more. You can create custom reports and it integrates nicely with other Google services such as Adwords and Website Optimizer.

2. Google Adwords – lets you create and run ads for your business. You can find out the percentage of people who click on your advertisements. You only pay when people click your ads. You can also find out the conversion rate, the rate at which your visitors are converted to actual buyers.

3. Email Campaigns – I’ve had pretty good success with a few email marketing tools to run campaigns for my business and for my clients. Most email tools will tell you how many of your visitors opened the email, forwarded it, or if it was sent to an incorrect email address.

4. Blog and Website Metrics – You can track the activity of your visitors on your website, blog or squeeze pages. You can find out how many times visitors come to your site, what they are viewing, how long they stay on your site, how they found your site (referring links) and much more. One of the tools already mentioned that accomplishes this is Google Analytics.

5. Social Media – You can measure the number of visitors and sources of traffic you have from the free reports from these tools. You can also measure the size of your following by the number of fans, followers and members that you have. And then finally, you can measure the quality of interaction you have with your visitors by the number of comments and posts that they leave on your social media sites.

It is up to you as to which type of metrics you use. It really depends on the type of campaign that you are trying to run. Or, if you decide to hire a web design or internet marketing company to do all of this web analytics for you, it is still good for you to have a basic understanding of what some of these metrics are.

But, the most important thing is that you actually look at your reports and analyze them.  Then follow-through and make the necessary changes to your site or campaign based on the results that you are getting.

3 thoughts on “Understanding Online Marketing: How to Tell If Your Online Marketing Plan is Working For Your Business”

  1. I enjoy what you guys are usually up too. Such clever work and coverage!

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