A lot of funds can be easily poured into Online Marketing and in most cases for the majority of organisations it is money spent sensibly. There are different types of Online Marketing that may have been purchased and evidently the costs vary dependent on which one has been selected. In the case of pay per click advertising, where an advertisement for the company is positioned in the “paid” advertising section of the search engine listings the cost is always worked out 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 therefore the number of clicks too, leading to a potentially high bill. If on the other hand search engine optimization has been adopted then the search for a particular keyword should see the optimized site sitting in the organic Search Engine Placement listing on page 1. This can cost an initial fee, followed a performance based ?15 per keyword on page 1. So as we can see both of these options entail investment.
It is therefore critical that the company can spot whether the Online Marketing is having a positive effect on business sales 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 was started (or in the case of Search engine optimization, when the page 1 listings were reached). Doing this will give a very clear picture, assuming all else is equal, of whether the investment is paying off.
If you discover that there is little or no change in this data, do not simply stop the method, there may be other issues that need working through in order to gain the benefits. Make certain you have web counters on every site. Preferably these will have been in place prior to the Online Marketing process started 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 unchanged then there are a few things that could be wide of the mark.
One is that you site does not offer the right information for the customer to buy, review which pages the customers leave from, is there something you could do to that layout to make it “snappier”, to incite a sale, or an enquiry? These alterations can be made almost right away and the results seen straight away too, so you’ll know when you’ve got it on the right track.
Another option is that the Keywords selected for the optimization process could in fact be the wrong ones. Maybe the searchers typing in those particular keywords do not actually want the products on offer, or maybe they are merely not in the market for them yet and therefore are just browsing. If this is the case it is not as easily rectified. If you used a Website Optimization Company to help you should go back to them and explain the issue. They should offer to re-work the keyword listing for you, however it does mean starting again with the optimization though.
