Tracking Your Success – How to Measure the ROI of Your Marketing

Tracking Your Success – How to Measure the ROI of Your Marketing:by Jason Gervais
If you own a small business, landscaping, or home improvement company you know how challenging it can be to track and measure the return on investment (ROI) for your marketing and advertising.
In this article I will share 4 methods that we use for our clients to measure the success of their internet marketing and also track the success of their other traditional marketing.
Most of our clients do not sell products or services directly online through their website, but it is still possible to measure their success.

1. Web Analytics

   Your website host may provide some web trends reports that tell you how many visits your site gets and how many hits you receive, but these data are usually very ambiguous and are not actually accurate since they don’t differentiate human visits from electronic/robot visits.
   Google Analytics has become the tool of choice for most internet marketing professionals.  With GA you are able to track all the human visitors to your website and monitor their activity.
   With hundreds of pieces of data available there is plenty of valuable information for the most analytic and detail oriented individuals and the graphs and charts give a very clear visual summary for those who prefer a “big picture” look at things.
   For measuring website success there are a few key factors that we focus on each month for our clients.
   Number of Visits: Obviously this is important.  How many visitors did you get. Once you have had your analytics tracking for a while you can do comparisons with previous months or quarters.  
   We always like to measure a month or quarter and compare it with the same month or quarter in the previous year to show traffic trends during the same period of time.  This is particularly useful for our seasonal clients such as our landscapers and landscape supply companies.
   Traffic Sources:  One of the summary screens I like to share with our clients is the “All Traffic” report.  At a glance it shows the top 10 traffic sources.  Ideally your top source is Google Organic, if you have good SEO on your site and then Google PPC if you are using paid search marketing.
   
   
   Bounce Rate: This is one of the most important metrics in my opinion.  A bounce occurs when someone enters and exits on the same page without clicking further.   It lets you know how interested your visitors are in your website, perhaps indicates that your visuals or your content is turning people away. 
   I like to see bounce rates between 30-40% for a standard website and 20-30% for an e-commerce website.  A niche e-commerce site with lots of products could have bounce rates between 10-20%.
   Bounce rates between 40-60% is not really bad but it usually indicates that your site could use more content, simplify the navigation or improve the conversion architecture.  Higher than 60% is a good indication that you need some help.

2. Conversion Metrics

   Unless your website is setup for e-commerce, it may be difficult to measure actual sales generated from the website, but it is easy to measure the number of leads your website is driving to you.   
   In Google Analytics you can create “goals” which will count each time a visitor reaches a destination page resulting from a specific action.  For example, if they submit a quote request form, the “thank you” page would be your goal page.  
   This allows you to count the number of leads generated each month, quarter or year.  You can setup multiple goals and measure each one individually.  So you may have a goal for a quote request, another for a newsletter signup, and one for a white paper download.

3. Phone Call Tracking

   About 5 years ago we started tracking all phone calls originating from our client’s websites.  It was a very eye-opening exercise.  On average, our clients get 3:1 phone calls versus forms submitted on their website.
   In their 2009 case study video, Van Beek’s Garden Supplies states that they got 1700 phone calls from their website in the month of May, 2009.
   This year, 2012 they had 1925 phone calls  and 571 form submissions in May.  Divide that by 22,171 website visits and you see a 11.26% conversion rate.  Eleven of every hundred visits contacted them!  Considering the internet average conversion rate is only 1%, these are excellent stats.
   To track your website generated phone calls, you need a unique tracking phone number.  This number should only be used on your website.  It simply forwards our calls to your local number.  There is no technical setup involved.
   The administrators of the phone number can generate reports that show the number of calls, the phone number calling (so you can eliminate duplicates) and the duration of each call.

4. Measuring your Off-Line Marketing

   How can you measure the success of your bus ad, the signs you put on lawns of job sites or direct mail pieces you are sending out?   Obviously if someone calls and says they got your name from that it’s easy, but what if they don’t mention it?  Does that mean it’s not working?
   Here are some things you can try to get a better handle on your non-digital marketing.
   Tracking Phone Numbers:  Just like the one you put on your website, you can have separate numbers for various marketing and advertising you are doing that will help you track them individually.
   Landing Pages: On your ad or display, include a unique website URL that can only be reached by typing it in directly to their browser.  Then your Google Analytics will tell you the exact number of visitors who went to the page
   Your landing page needs to have a unique and attractive offer and a call to action so you can also track the number of visitors who converted.  Plus once they have taken the desired action you will have collected their email address and you can now nurture a relationship with them for future purchases.
   QR Codes:  These are a great way to get visitors to your landing pages.  Anyone with a smart phone can use a QR Code.  Your print ad or display can entice visitors to follow the QR Code link to take advantage of your special offer.
   The goal of all your marketing should be to generate a phone call or a website visitor.  Depending on your type of business, you may also be looking for foot-traffic but in my opinion it is better to get them onto your website before they come into your location.
   By getting them on your website, they are doing their preliminary homework so you can spend less time educating them and they are in a position to convert on your site by taking advantage of your offer so you can collect their email address and begin a lead nurturing process.
   For one of our clients with a large home leisure retail store, we have an offer on their site to join their “Leisure Living Club” and they receive a discount coupon to take into the store with them.  So we can measure the number of visitors who joined the club and they can also measure the number of those who came in to redeem their discount.

I would say that 95% of the small business owners I have met over the last 7 years say that one of their biggest frustrations in business is not being able to measure how well their  marketing is working and decide where to keep investing, where to stop investing, and where to invest more.  If this sounds familiar to you, we can help.

This article about how to Track your Marketing ROI was originally posted in WSI Milton, an Internet marketing blog.