Internet Marketing Tips for Online Business Websites

DILLIP KUMAR BARIK Wishes Happy New Year -2013

Too many marketers fail to track anything beyond traffic and profit. They look at the basic numbers. As long as they are making and getting traffic, they are happy. Instead of trying to maximize the value of each visitor, they simply try to drive more traffic so they can hopefully make more money.

The truth is that there are some important marketing metrics that can greatly improve a marketer's ability to make more money, whether they get more traffic or not.

Here are 5 marketing metrics that should be the focus of every online marketer.

1) Conversion Rates

Traffic is important, but what that traffic does when it hits your site is more important. If one thousand visitors reach your site every day, how many of them are converting into a sale or an email opt-in?

Growing your audience is important, but it doesn't need to be as big as most people think. As long as engagement is high, conversions will follow suit.

2) Traffic Value

Using sites like SEMRush, it is possible to see how much your traffic would cost if acquired through paid means. This information is helpful for two important reasons.

The first is that it helps you to see how much you may charge for advertising space, and even to sell a website should an interested buyer come along.

The other has to do with determining whether your advertising strategy is planned correctly. Are you bidding too high for certain terms? If so, you may choose to lower your bids or to abandon paid advertising altogether and opt for organic and referral based traffic methods.

3) Cost Per Lead

With the two metrics mentioned above, this leads to the total cost per lead or customer acquisition. If you track the previously mentioned metrics, you will see how much each visitor costs, and how often they convert to a sale or lead.

With these two pieces of information in place, you can then look to see how much it actually costs to get a new customer or lead. This information is useful in further refining your marketing strategy, as well as your pricing strategy for products and services.

4) Visitor Engagement

Engagement has multiple aspects. These include the average time on site, page views, bounce rate, and social sharing and commenting. All of these are reflective of the quality of your site and whether your content and marketing strategy are appealing to your target visitors.

For sites that are driven by content marketing, this metric helps to drive the long term content strategy as well. Once one theme is identified as a strong performer, more resources can be put into developing content around it, as well as marketing to new visitors likely to find it appealing.

5) Site Speed

While not truly a marketing metric, some sites are losing a lot of money by having a slow loading website. In fact, almost half of users expect a site to load in 2 seconds or less. When that time frame is stretched out to 6-10 seconds, many people are likely to abandon the page and look for something else.

All of the other metrics above are impacted if a site begins loading slowly. Taking the time to speed up the site at every opportunity can lead to a substantial increase in profit.

Marketing Metrics Are Like a Road Map.......

As you gain enough data by tracking these marketing metrics, you will notice that your decisions are easier to make in many cases. The numbers never lie. If there is room for improvement, the data will show it and a well informed testing plan can be put in place.