Analytics and Marketing ROI

Marketing is crucial to every business. As the Internet has become an integral part of just about every business, marketing has changed. We now typically use email marketing, web based marketing, newsletter sponsorships, links, pay-per-click and many more strategies that are all driving traffic to our sites. Why do we spend incredible amounts of marketing money on a monthly basis? We do it because our businesses all depend on consumers finding our products and understanding our unique message.

A quick case study: In the early 90’s, a technical software company that was very successful utilized print and direct mail as their primary sources of advertising. (Remember that the internet was not yet prolific.) The goal of that company was to keep its advertising costs to 20% of total revenue. It was not easy to accomplish that goal. As the Internet grew and became increasingly viable, a new ad medium was born. A second company in that same industry – a direct competitor - was capable of reducing its cost of advertising to 9% of its total revenue – an astonishing 11% improvement which fell directly to the bottom line. The internet and email were the only sources of advertising used by that company. The Internet was not solely responsible for that improvement – tracking and analytics were equally responsible for the lowered cost and increased profits. There are so many ways to advertise on the Internet that without a thorough understanding of ROI a great deal of money can be wasted and profits minimized. Conversely, strong analytics can increase a company’s profits dramatically by controlling costs.

The 11% increase in profit for the second company in the example above illustrates how important analytics are in marketing. It has become incredibly important to understand the effectiveness of each and every marketing strategy we use. Each ad placement must be tracked for efficiency to insure that you don’t throw good money after bad and reduce the overall effectiveness of your budget. It seems we all have marketing budgets that are never big enough regardless of the actual size. The analytics incorporated within Site Search Architect certainly monitor your traffic but more importantly, track your lead flow. We track exactly where the visitor to your site came from. As an example if you use pay-per-click advertising, we’ll tell you not only which search engine the visitor came from but which term he or she searched to find you. We’ll tell the path he or she took through your site and which page prompted them to request information - and if they do request info we’ll get you the lead while the visitor is still on the site. You’ll know how many of those expensive clicks resulted in a lead and ultimately a sale.

We track all of your responses from all of your ad sources by individual tracking code so when you do an email drop (check out a great solution to email marketing)  you not only know how many people opened it and visited your site but also how many requested information. You can then track your sales data so that you can determine an accurate ROI on each advertising buy you make. You will no longer have to rely on how many people opened an email and clicked through to your site as some measure of ROI. Imagine having the ability to know within a short time after an ad runs what your short term ROI is and to further be able to track long term effectiveness. How many times have you bought advertising several times before determining it didn’t work? What has that cost you over the time you’ve been in business? If you could cut the ineffective ads out after the first run…what would that save you? Or if you could use real data to negotiate better rates on future buys with the same advertising companies, how much better would your bottom line become?

Site Search Architect can pay for itself in as little as one month depending on your advertising expenditures. SSA analytics are so sophisticated that you will have data that normally would require several highly skilled employees to gather…it’s at your fingertips at all times.

Any discussion on ROI would not be complete without some mention of free traffic from visitors searching for your product or service on the Internet. Site Search Architect has been designed to improve your rankings within the search engines by creating technically correct web pages. When your site has been optimized by SSA the ranking will improve and higher rankings mean more traffic and ultimately more business.