A lot of resource can be easily spent on Online Marketing and in most cases for the majority of businesses it is money spent sensibly. There are different sorts of Online Marketing that may have been purchased and clearly the costs vary dependent on which one has been used. In the case of pay per click advertising, where an advertisement for the company appears in the “paid” advertising section of the search engine listings the cost is always calculated as a multiple of the number of searchers who actually click on the advert. If the attention is high this will mean that the cost of each click is high and of course the number of clicks too, leading to a potentially costly invoice. If on the other hand search engine optimization has been applied then the search for a particular keyword should see the optimized site placed in the organic Search Engine Placement listing on page 1. This can cost an upfront fee, followed a performance based £15 per keyword on page 1. So as we can see both of these options necessitate investment.
It is therefore vital that the organisation can recognise whether the Online Marketing is having a positive effect on trading and if that effect is worth the spend. One way to do this of course is to watch the sales figures carefully and cross reference these chronologically with when the online marketing campaign began (or in the case of Search engine optimization, when the page 1 listings were achieved). Doing this will give a very clear display, assuming all else is equal, of whether the investment is paying off.
If you find that there is little or no change in this data, do not simply stop the process, there may be other issues that need sorting out in order to gain the benefits. Make sure you have web counters on each site. Ideally these will have been in place prior to the Online Marketing process began so that you can see if the visitor numbers have gone up. If you have one of the good web counters you should also be able to see which pages visitors leave from. If the visitors numbers are a lot higher than before but your sales figures remain unaffected then there are a few things that could be wrong.
One is that you site does not provide the correct information for the customer to buy, review which pages the customers leave from, is there anything you could do to that page to make it “snappier”, to incite a purchase, or an enquiry? These alterations can be made almost immediately and the results seen straight away too, so you’ll know when you’ve got it right.
Another option is that the Keywords chosen for the optimization process could in fact be the wrong ones. Maybe the searchers keying in those particular keywords do not actually want the goods on offer, or maybe they are simply not in the market for them yet and therefore are just browsing. If this is the case it is not as easily dealt with. If you used a search engine optimization company to steer you should go back to them and explain the problem. They should offer to re-work the keyword listing for you, however it does mean starting again with the optimization though.