Step-by-Step Plan to Measure Return on Online Marketing Investment ROI

Step-by-Step Plan to Measure Return on Online Marketing Investment ROI

An SEO campaign is designed to help increase the amount of business you get by making your website rank higher in search engines. But how do you measure your return on investment when the statistics used to measure SEO are given in terms of rankings or traffic? In today's economy, every penny counts, so it's important to have some way of determining the ROI for SEO campaigns that you initiate.

How to Evaluate your SEO Return on Investment

ROI is typically understood as the return on an initial investment. Due to the nature of SEO, results are not immediately seen, and SEO campaigns are often subject to uncontrollable outside factors. Thus, calculating the ROI of an SEO campaign requires more than a simple monetary value, or a comparison between revenue and expenditures.

Unfortunately, Google Analytics does not have a single report that will allow you to chart the profitability of your SEO campaign. However, by assessing growth in all areas where SEO has an impact, such as rankings, traffic, conversion rate, and revenue, we can get a more complete view of an SEO campaign's performance and calculate a reasonable approximation of ROI.

Online Ranking

Usage of a simple rank tracker can help you track how you rank on results pages when certain keywords are used. The right keywords will prompt people to click on your listings, but irrelevant ones do absolutely nothing for your business or your bottom line. Thus, it is important to thoroughly research keywords that are not only relevant to the business, but will also help you rank well.

Online Traffic

Traffic is directly proportional to your rankings, so if your rankings increase over time, then so should your traffic. When looking at search traffic, make sure to look at organic search traffic that comes from search results pages only, and not at traffic that comes as a result of advertisements on those search results pages.

Conversion Rate Performance

Conversion rate is tied to traffic, much like traffic is related to ranking. It is basically the number of visitors, coming from search engine results pages, that turn into paying customers. It is directly tied to revenue and profits and can be negatively impacted by a number of factors, such as poor coding, impossible-to-navigate landing pages, or confusing content.

Revenue

Revenue is the ultimate gauge of success. It is affected by substantially more factors compared to the other metrics discussed, but by comparing your revenue to your search engine rankings, traffic and conversion rates, you can get an idea of how effective your SEO campaign is.

Conclusion

When it comes to evaluating the effectiveness of an SEO campaign, the ability to track progress in all four different areas is important. Being able to see track increases and decreases in these areas will help you locate and fix problems with your marketing strategy and improve your overall bottom line. A good SEO marketing campaign should show growth in all these areas and though it may not be straightforward, use of the right measurements and metrics you can show meaningful results.

Orlando Web Design was founded in 2006 to provide businesses and industries with access to top-flight, multi-disciplined design and marketing teams to solve their product marketing, website / print design, and software development challenges.  FLSITES offers marketing and design “on demand” for companies with staff limitations, work overflow, changing workloads, or those that lack a specific technical expertise. For additional information on how to improve your online performance with traceable ROI measurements, decrease overhead cost, and better ensure growth and sustainability, visit our Orlando Web Design website.