The 3 secrets to successfully analyzing your marketing

By Shaan Yuhas
Posted Friday, November 5, 2004

It used to be that just getting traffic to your website was success. Today that just isn't the case. To survive on the internet, marketers have to increase traffic and improve conversion ratios, requiring more accountability from marketing efforts and investments. What does this mean? It means analyzing traffic from your marketing campaign to the user's action. Whether it's an affiliate sign-up, sale, newsletter opt in. Such data is vital in learning how to better target your customers and improving profitability.

What to analyze? The great thing about the internet marketing is that you can can monitor your campaigns traffic, conversions, and evaluate the overall performance. It's important that you analyze, measure and continuously improve the overall performance of your marketing campaign. As simple as it sounds, many people find it difficult to analyze the data captured. How do I analyze my traffic...The first step to analyzing your campaign is pinpointing exactly where the users are coming from. Whether it's email, search engines, or affiliates. So let us talk a second about how to gather this information.

All the data resides on your server in logs. While the logs can be confusing and frustrating to read. There are some great traffic analysis tools such as...

extreme-dm.com
hitbox.com
web-stat.com
webtrends.com

Many are free and very useful. Although you can pay a few dollars a month and get some extra features. You can track keywords, web site referrals and much more. By taking this information and familiarizing yourself with how users are getting to your site. It will help you better optimize, improve, and target traffic.

Converting your traffic

What do you want to measure to determine what site changes might improve your conversion ratio? This depends on the nature of your site. What is the focus for the visitor at your site? Buy a product? Subscribe to a service? - Opt-in to your newsletter? - Recruit an affiliate?

Each site will have specific goals. The best way to determine how well your site attracts and converts visitors is to analyze, test and tweak the different elements of the site such as:

Sales Offers.
Sales letter copy.
Photos and other images. - Product/Service Price. - Headlines.
Guarantees.
Different products and services. - Site design, color schemes, fonts, navigation, etc.

Troubleshoot and determine what areas appeal to the user and once you identify the reason why users visit your site, you can assign desired variables to the visitor's actions and follow their movements within your site to determine how successfully you are meeting your goals. If you lead them to subscribe to a free newsletter and only get 2 or 3 leads a week. You might be asking for too much information or the form might not be user-friendly. Take whatever variables come into play, then tweak and test until you get the desired response. Always strive to improve your conversion ratio! We all can improve.

Shaan Yuhas has developed a revolutionary ad management tracking system called "ROI Cruncher", track every action at your web site, increase return of investment, cut marketing cost, better target your customers with an all new TRACKING system! (http://www.roicruncher.com)

Evaluate the campaigns Performance

There are many different tactics you can use to analyze the effectiveness of your marketing campaign. Each site has different objectives; therefore, the key performance measures will vary. However, below are six basic measures you can use for evaluating the performance of your campaign. Total Unique Visitors - The number of visitors that responded to your campaign. The call-to-action depends on your objectives - Registering for a newsletter or trial - Purchasing a product or service. - Subscribing to paid services. - Cost Per Desired Action This is the cost of generating each desired action. - It is measured by dividing total campaign expense by the number of desired actions generated.

Conversion Rate
This is the percentage of unique visitors completing your desired action. It is measured by dividing total desired actions by the total unique visitors.(Actionsunique hits)

Percentage ROI
Calculate the return on investment for each campaign by subtracting total costs from total revenue, then dividing by total cost.

Once you've defined your performance of your campaign, you can use this campaign to test the marketing message on your site, the effectiveness of your offer, test the appropriate variables. Tweaking your campaign will likely result in increased conversions, lower marketing costs, and improved ROI.