How will you measure success with Search?

If getting searchers to visit your web site is not usually your main goal, a key question may be, "How else can you measure the success of your web site?" Think about it--you’ve created your website for a specific purpose. Maybe it's to sell products; to get visitors to read articles; to persuade; to instruct; or some other goal important to your business.

The nature of the goal specific to your web site and business will determine how GDM InterActive measures success with our search marketing program. Generally, success on the web site is measured by these key factors:

• Visits - A good metric for entertainment and persuasion sites
• Conversions - A good metric for lead generation web sites (such as free registrations, free downloads, etc.)
• Counting dollars - Useful for full-blown e-commerce web sites, and the ultimate offline metric for the above two

Visits

Visits are easy to measure. When someone clicks on your link, they arrive at your landing page. Most web sites are equipped to track these basic metrics simply by using the simple numbers from your control panel.  

Conversions

Conversions are more complex to measure, but not difficult. Every time the searcher who has landed on your website performs a specific action such as buying product, filling out a contact information form for follow-up, making a donation, downloading a file, or simply creating content such as a product review, you have a conversion of some form. Most analytics programs are equipped to record conversion goals once they have been defined.

To really track your success with search marketing, you need some form of web analytics program. GDM InterActive uses Google analytics. We can help you install Google's software into your web pages. If you have a very simple site, you can probably install it yourself. However, we have a few extra tricks up our sleeve that might help you out in the long run, and give you a leg up on your competition!

Here is a simple equation for calculating your conversion rate. Knowing your conversion rate creates an assumption you can use to project increased orders if you are able to increase the number of visits.

If you don't know your conversion rate , or cannot establish a dollar value for conversions, you have some work to do. Developing solid conversation strategies requires an intimate knowledge of your business and business model. GDM InterActive can work together with you to develop solid conversions strategies that will increase visits, increase your conversion rates, and the ultimate goal, increase orders.

Counting Dollars

Counting dollars can be the most complicated metric. If you are running a straightforward catalog or e-commerce web site, recording dollars in transactions is usually a simple function built into your web analytics package. However, many web sites exist as an intermediate step toward the final goal such as ad sales or lead generation.

For example, the website may exist solely to collect contact information by offering free downloads, white papers etc. A follow-up process very often takes place via telemarketing or direct mail efforts. These types of transactions are more difficult to track back to the original web site visit. But getting the tracking in place is very important to your success. After all, you want to find out what's really working in your advertising budget with the dollars you spend, don't you? Other examples of multiple step processes include web sites geared toward generating inbound phone sales calls to a toll free line, or discount coupons meant to be used at a retail outlet.

Tracking these offline sales to web activity takes effort and discipline, but is well worth the trouble! Why? Because it allows you to justify spending time and effort on search engine marketing while helping you to project and forecast your business more accurately.

Here is that same conversion rate table with conversion dollars added:

Here is the same table with the intermediate step of lead generation added:

These tables give you the conceptual idea of what tracking search marketing success is all about. GDM InterActive will provide you with meaningful analysis and reporting based on your goals and your strategy.  Web marketing generates a lot of numbers. Not all of them are meaningful. We'll help you zero in on the metrics that really move the dial for your website, your business, and your profitability.