There’s no doubt that a clean, elegant, easy-to-navigate, and customer-focused website is an excellent business tool with the potential to boost sales, revolutionize marketing, and streamline internal business processes. Assuming a company website has been developed in accordance with these guiding principles and is being well received by staff and existing customers, the company is probably ready to start marketing its website both online and through traditional means. This is an essential step in expanding market share and reducing costs, but for many business people, understanding what they can expect from an online marketing plan and how to measure results can be difficult.

The Online Advantage

The first thing to understand about online marketing techniques like banner advertising, directory listings, and search marketing is that the results for most businesses will be relatively the same as results from traditional marketing. The upside to traditional marketing channels like getting the company website address on everything from business cards to company cars is that they are cost-effective and fulfill a critical role in retaining existing business and attracting new customers—but they may be difficult to measure. Internet marketing is an entirely different story.

New contacts established through online marketing will most often come in as emails, online purchases, or completed information request forms, which can be tracked. Online marketing also provides tangible measurement data—number of ad views, number of visits to your site, and the amount of time spent of the site—that allows business owners to tailor and change the program to capitalize on the strongest areas while revamping the weaker links.

Reasonable Expectations

Whether using online or traditional marketing channels, or a combination of both, most companies will achieve a one to three percent conversion rate from their efforts. (You may have heard crazy success stories about businesses who’ve marketed online or you might have been promised high returns from online service providers, but the reality is if you budget and plan for a one to three percent return, you will not be disappointed.)

One to three percent means that for every 100 people that view your marketing material one to three people will respond, either immediately or in the near future. While this may seem like a trivial return it can be a lucrative channel for expanding the customer base, especially if you add up how much the average customer spends with your business over an extended period of time. Studies have shown it takes about nine contacts with a prospective customer before they make contact with the company. These nine contacts typically come from multiple marketing channels such as personal contact, sales calls, advertising, and now the company website.

A Focused Plan

Once the company has reviewed online marketing services and selected the ones that fit the target market, it’s time to decide on what products or services to market and how to market them, keeping budget and timeline in mind. Businesses should remember the longer an online marketing program runs, the more data that will be available to measure the program’s success.

There are three steps for any online marketing program:

1. 1. Get the right people to your site
2. 2. Keep them there
3. 3. Convert them to prospective clients by encouraging them to contact the company

With these three simple steps in mind it becomes a lot easier to gauge success. While many technology companies will dazzle current and prospective clients with an array of statistical data, there are really only a few key metrics needed to evaluate the success of your online marketing—everything else is just icing on the cake.

Key Measures

The four key metrics for online advertising are:

1. Ad Impressions – How many people saw my ad? 

It is important not to count “hits” or “robot traffic,” just actual people

Clicks are great, but sometimes users may have clicked by accident, so keep an eye on a metric called “Bounce Rate,” which refers to users that just took a look and left. Typical Bounce Rates average about 40% to 50% of clicks.

Generally speaking the longer people spend on a site and the more pages they look at, the more qualified they are as potential clients. This usually also indicates the quality of the marketing services (referring website) where your ad was posted.