How Do I Measure the Success of My Internet Marketing Efforts?

Measuring the success of Internet marketing efforts is easy, because you have quantifiable results. Online marketing differs from traditional marketing because you get immediate feedback, which can be measured in clicks, conversions, registration, or sales. With a traditional marketing campaign, with its lag between execution and results, you need to rely on opinion — your own, a focus group's, or a consultant's — which can be subjective and unreliable.

In the online world, what you think is important isn't always important. You have to remember that the lab rat — or customer — is always right. If customers have a choice of yellow and blue and tend to pick yellow, then yellow is the way to go. Immediate feedback can help drive the direction of your online marketing campaign. Try, test, and measure to determine what works and what doesn't.

There are a number of companies that provide Web site analytic tools to help you determine who is doing what on your site. Popular products include WebTrends, WebSideStory HBX, Omniture SiteCatalyst, Coremetrics and FireClick. These tend to be costly, so make sure you need all of their features and support. You can set up the products to provide helpful metrics, including:

Visitors per month. Site visitors are counted in two ways. "Visitors" are the total number of people who come to your site in a month. "Unique visitors" are the number of different individuals who visit your site.

Page views per month: the number of individual pages of your site that users have viewed.

Amount of time visitors spend on your site. Once you have determined the number of people visiting your site, it's helpful to find out how long they are spending on your site.

Visitor click paths: the route that visitors take to navigate through your site.

Number of search engine referrals per month. You can track which search engines are sending the most people to your site. You can also track the keywords that users are typing into search engines that lead them to your site. This will help you determine what keywords you need to use to optimize your site and which keywords you should sponsor to promote your business.

Number of links to your site. The more sites that you have linking to your site, the more routes search engine spiders will have to search your site and record data. More routes means better rankings.

If your needs are more pedestrian, try a simpler solution. Direct Response, for instance, performs simple conversion tracking and is much more affordable. There's also an open source Web analytics tool called AWStats that tracks traffic, referrers, and other data. If you use Google or Overture to target users by sponsoring keywords, you can measure sales with their free conversion-based tracking tools.

Because Internet marketing campaigns are always works in progress, keep a history of what works and what doesn't. A careful record of what you've tried and what's worked will prove invaluable.