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Internet Marketing Essentials: Tracking and Optimizing
By: Gregory Smyth
Post Date: 2010-03-08
Internet marketing is becoming better accepted in the conservative corporate community. The departure from the traditional principles of advertising (in some respects) has made for a learning curve among managers and marketers alike. Yet today, a significant percentage of large firms have corporate blogs, do display advertising and PPC search engine marketing online, have optimized their website for certain keywords, and regularly run online marketing campaigns with finesse and style.
Yet for all the money being spent online, some is still wasted ... because many businesses fail to see the value in tracking the results of their activities and campaigns. Today we are looking at why tracking is still resisted and under-utilized in the business community, and why it is essential to internet marketing success.
Why should we track?
The basic reason to track the results of your internet marketing campaigns is to learn what works in marketing to your particular audience, and then give them what they want. This eliminates the lower-returning types of advertising, and increases the overall effectiveness of your web marketing strategy. An easy way to understand the principle is by using examples:
A company has a monthly PPC budget of US$5,000. This is spread over 20 different keywords. Without tracking, you will know that your PPC ads bring in US$10,000 per month. By implementing web analytics and tracking, you can see that 10 of the keywords bring in all of that income, with the remaining ten keywords creating no revenue at all (but contributing to the spend).
You submit articles to various online sources for search engine optimization every month, one for each of the two main areas of your business. However, while the articles from one business area generate thousands of visitors, the articles from the other business area are consistently ignored. Tracking would allow you to identify this and continue only with those that are actually making money.
One of your online advertisements is getting exceptional click-through rates, with around 10% of viewers clicking on the ad. However, it has a bug that means it will only work with Firefox and Internet Explorer. Implementing tracking would allow you to see the thousands of Safari, Chrome and Opera users that cannot reach your site through the ad, fix the problem and boost your revenue accordingly.
Why don't people like to track?
Often, tracking is seen as an extra, unnecessary expense. People don't want to pay for website analytics software; even free options like Google Analytics are seen as a drain on their time and resources. Tracking isn't a huge part of offline marketing, so it is assumed that in internet marketing it is a luxury, not a necessity.
What is not widely understood is that tracking removes the wastefulness and low returns that characterized traditional marketing. It is not because of the new platform that internet marketing is the tool of a new age, but because of our ability to better understand how we promote businesses ... and what is effective in each case. Webtrends analytics software is an investment, not an expense.
Major web analytics platforms have been partnering up with internet marketing firms across the world to make tracking and analysis of web analytics simpler, both in terms of business processes and cost. Managed services are now available that remove the burden of self-administration, as well as the cost of hardware and software for tracking processes. It is now easier than ever for companies to take advantage of the benefits of tracking, with a lower associated investment.
Article Source: http://www.easyarticlesubmit.com
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