ROI Tracking

ROI stands for Return On Investment. And ROI is something that you have to track. It is the basic way to see if you are making money or losing it. And it is amazing to me how many times people just don't track this.

In its most simple sense ROI tracking just means seeing how much money you are making on any marketing spend. Online this means tracking the amount of sales you make on any PPC spend like Adwords, or banner spend if you are doing general advertising through display advertising, etc.

ROI tracking comes in a few flavors. In PPC, Google Analytics and Bing Ads both provide trackers you can place on your order confirmation page that allow you then to track the sales made by your ads. If you code them right, they not only tell you the number of sales, but the amounts sold as well. You will find details on how to set these up and the coding you need to place on your website at Adwords and Bing Ads.

Once you have these trackers in place, you can then see which keywords are paying off -- and how much you are getting in revenue for your dollars spent. Really important information in order for you to understand where you should be spending your money (and where you should not be spending it). So if you don't know how to put these trackers in, make sure to have your webmaster do it for you.

In addition, you can find third party services that may offer other information like Hypertracker which I've used for years. I like this because it allows me to easily test multiple landing pages and get the conversion data.

Lastly, you can also get similar information from Google Analytics. If you have it set up to do ecommerce tracking, you can see that value of the visitors you have coming in from any particular source (PPC, organic traffic, referral traffic, etc), by keyword, etc. So it is again important to have Analytics code put on your site and also have the ecommerce tracking working as well. Again, if you can't do it, have your webmaster do it. Getting the ecommerce tracking to work can be a bit tricky, so you may need to work with your shopping cart provider to get this all working (it took me a long time to get it working, so I know it can be a real struggle, but it is worth it).

The beauty of ROI tracking is not only that you get a good read on what keywords or PPC advertising is driving sales, but what isn't. This means that you know have the tools to really figure out which parts of your advertising is cost effective and which isn't. This allows you to martial your money much more effectively to those keywords that convert, and also get a much better handle on how much to bid for a particular keyword. Bottom line - don't be pulled in by ego or a need to get sales in bidding for a keyword. Analyze its ROI and then you will know what the keyword is worth to you. If you get a 3% conversion on a product that has a $15 profit, then the most you can bid is $.45 to break even.

Tweaking Your Site and Business

Once you have identified a problem with your site, the next step is trying to remedy the problem. Once I've identified a page or pages that seem to be having a problem, I always start with trying to improve these page's usability. This may mean redesigning the page so the content is more easily found, improving the site or page's navigation, making sure that ordering information is easily found, providing better or more detailed information, making sure the important information is above the fold, etc.

I've often found I have to try 4 or more variations of a single page before I come up with one that works well. The important thing is to be systematic about making these changes. Try one or two at first and then test it for a bit, and if you don't see improvement try a couple of other changes.

If you try these kind of usability changes and don't see any improvement, you may want to look at basic product issues. Are your customers finding your products easily? Do you carry a good selection, and are these easy to search through? Is you pricing competitive with other web sellers? Would free shipping help to get people through the ordering process? Would a strong money back guarantee help?

I've tried all these strategies at different times, and they all have worked. These are more business types of issues than pure web issues, and you may well have a good handle on a lot of these from your previous business experience with these products. But I've noticed many bricks and mortar retailers have a difficult time adjusting to the realities of web business.

Web customers are different - they need to have a certain level of comfort before buying from a company they just came across on the web. Money back guarantees, free shipping, membership in the BBB, customer reviews or Epinions ratings, guaranteeing security of the ordering process - all these can play an important part in whether a customer ultimately feels comfortable in buying from your web business. So if you site seems to work well in other respects, you may need to consider these kind of basic, web business issues in order to increase the effectiveness of your web business.

Next > Driving Traffic to Your Site.

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