Internet Marketing Article #6: Managing Your Online Advertisement Channels

Whether you are managing your own advertisement channels or hiring some professional help, you should be monitoring the performance of every advertisement channel. The general criterion is simple - the price you pay for using the advertisement channel, in terms of money, time and efforts, should be worth the outcome of that channel. And, naturally, you want to get more then what you paid for.

For an example, if you selling a product and making a net profit (after tax) of $10 on each item sold, you do not want to indulge yourself in a PPC (Pay-per-click) campaign that charges you $1 per click. In order to return your investment, you will need a conversion rate of at least 10 %, which is phenomenally high! In other words, if you are paying $1 per click, you will need to make at least 1 out of 10 users coming from that source buy your product. This goal is almost impossible on the Web these days where users have a lot more control over the purchasing process than "typical" consumers, are making less impulsive purchases, are quickly jumping from one provider to another, easily comparing prices at different sites and taking their time to make sure that they are secure when making the deal with you.

While you want to always monitor an online advertisement channel, you also want to give a chance to new online advertisement channels, different seasons and situations. In reality, you can know how good a marketing channel is after you've tested it. And even then, you can't be really sure. That's why you need to consistently and systematically monitor your online advertisement channels.

When analyzing your web stats, here are some major items that you want to look at:

(1) Unique visitors - tells you how many times unique users visited your site. Note that the same person visiting your site twice within ½ an hour, will count as 1 unique visit in most server configurations.

(2) Repeat visitors - shows you how many visitors have been at your site before. This may be a good indication of your retention rate. It "may be" and not "is" depending on additional factors. For example, a web page that provides a link to make it the browser's default homepage will probably generate more repeated visitors. In effect, many of those repeated visits may be lying about the real retention rate since users might be opening their browsers and surfing immediately to other sites. But, in general, repeated visitors in a good indication for the loyalty of your users. As an example, if you provide quality, updated content, you will have more repeated visitors.

(3) Referrals - Sites that are referring traffic to your site.

(4) Search strings - this amazing stat tells you what search strings your visitors are typing into various search engines before they come to your site. This can really help you know who your customers are and where to invest in further advertisements.

(5) Search engines - search engines that are referring traffic to your site. If, for example, you are selling items via your web site and you see an increase of 100% in the traffic coming from a certain search engine, but sales are not increasing at all then you are either targeting the wrong search terms (in other words, the search terms that users are typing into the engines are unrelated to what you are providing in your site), you have some serious errors in your site, you business model is erroneous (e.g. same product, double the price) or you need to invest in a different search engine that attracts different users.

(6) Site paths - tells you where the users are starting their surf in your site (e.g. homepage) and where are they going from there. For example: homepage -> product page -> order form.

(7) Exit page - What is the page last visited by a user before he exited your site. For example, if 75% of users are exiting your homepage (most important page of any website) within the first 10 seconds then you've got a problem with your website. You need to find out where that problem is, fix it and then measure again.

Your online advertising mix should be divided into the different channels and each one should be constantly measured using decisive tools. In addition, pay careful attention to what it is you're measuring. Don't measure only the number of hits or visitors since that doesn't necessarily tell you if you're on the right track. For example, you can be selling something through your website and get thousands of visitors a day, but making almost no sales at all. Make sure you measure the relevant events for your target results.

Read the next essential article in this series of articles:
(1) Define YOUR Internet Success.
(2) Target Action of a Website.
(3) Market Research and Analysis.
(4) Build a Website.
(5) Website Quality Control.
(6) Managing Your Online Advertisement Channels.
(7) Online Customer Service.
(8) Stay Updated & Innovate Online.