The Art of War and the Marketer Part 2: Measuring Results Means Preparation to Get Results

“Earth gives birth to length. Length gives birth to volume. Volume gives birth to counting. Counting gives birth to weighing. Weighing gives birth to victory.”
~ Sun Tzu

All the great content, spot-on ads, and social media building is worth exactly nothing if you can’t quantify the results. It’s as if someone got a group of people together to have an election, got a bunch of people to vote and when asked who won, points vaguely and says that guy over there won. How do they know? They just looked at the ballots and didn’t so much count them as they guessed it was that guy because a lot of people seemed to like him.

Now, let’s apply this to a content campaign. You have a blog and post regularly, with links on your customer-facing social media sites – Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn. You start getting link-backs, likes, and otherwise noticing your hits taking a climb. But where is the traffic coming from? Is there an influencer at work, here? You need to have metrics, but more than that, you need to have effective metrics. Let’s break it down.

• Traffic generation: How much traffic a given campaign and SEO drives to your site. This is the raw stream for your conversion rate, since without traffic there are no conversions taking place.
• Conversion rate: A conversion is when someone, after reading your blog entry or viewing an ad, takes the desired action. Whether that action is clicking the ad, making a purchases, or contacting you, all of these actions are valuable conversions. Tracking your conversions to see how many visitors take these actions gives you a conversion rate.
• Revenue: How much profit are you realizing from your traffic and conversions? Is it enough to justify the cost of your campaigns?

Now these three factors need to be further broken down.

• Traffic needs to be broken down into smaller bites. There’s your overall traffic from all sources including mobile, and you need to know what keywords and sources brought them to your site.
• Conversions break down to an overall click through rate, but the clicks are only the beginning. Where did they click? What did they click? When did they click? How long did they stay – did they view more than one page or bounce right back out? What’s the average time on your site, and do those clickers convert into repeat traffic? Remember, you are trying to get the interest of people who might have less than the average span of attention of a goldfish.
• Revenue is a big part of this, because your site costs money. How much is your cost per click? Per page view? How much money does it take to generate a lead? What is your return on investment (ROI) from a given campaign? And what is your average cost to acquire a new customer? To get these numbers you have to calculate your total costs for design, hosting, site maintenance, SEO, plus your marketing and advertising costs and divide by paying customers within the time period of the campaign.

Head spinning? That’s okay. You don’t have to go it alone because there are people who specialize in doing exactly this. We can help you and work with you to craft great campaigns that will help you build your business and brand, without adding another full-time job to your already crazy schedule. We have the experience and expertise to make your marketing easier, more effective, and a better return on investment. Give us a call!

About 4 Step Studio

4 Step Studio is an online marketing agency that specializes in website design and redesign, SEO, social media and more. Our team of experts focuses on helping small business get found online, while educating them on what will make them successful in the digital world. To learn more about what we can do for you, visit our website at www.4StepStudio.com