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One of the most commonly asked questions in the Internet marketing industry has to do with return on investment. Some internet marketing services can be harder to track than others. While some forms (such as PPC) are easy to track in terms of clicks, costs, and revenue, other forms are more like traditional advertising where you’re taking the time to build a brand and online presence to create sales tomorrow.

Using our handy chart below, you can see all the various forms of return on your internet marketing. While all internet marketing services positively affect each of these aspects, we have highlighted only those with the largest impact.

Best practices say to use a good mix of all of these marketing services to develop a well rounded campaign that can benefit from all forms of return. If you are having a hard time explaining or understanding the return on your investment, this chart will help!

ROI On Internet Marketing Services

Article Marketing

Cost: $
Description: Industry specific pieces of content distributed across the internet with keyword rich links to your website, but little real traffic sees them.
Search Rankings: Yes
Traffic: No
Sales: No
Branding: No

Directory Listings

Cost: $
Description: Keyword anchor text links on relevant pages linking to your website. However, humans rarely use them, so just for SEO.
Search Rankings: Yes
Traffic: No
Sales: No
Branding: No

Guest Blog Posts

Cost: $
Description: Finding industry relevant blogs where you can write a guest post is a great way to engage with your audience and build a brand, as well as quality, in-content backlinks.
Search Rankings: Yes
Traffic: No
Sales: No
Branding: Yes

Email Marketing

Cost: $
Description: Once you have customer email addresses, regular updates on news and offers can be a great way to build a relationship and generate additional sales.
Search Rankings: No
Traffic: Yes
Sales: Yes
Branding: Yes

Press Releases

Cost: $$
Description: Optimized releases distributed via online media channels have great potential to increase your online visibility, including keyword links to your site.
Search Rankings: Yes
Traffic: No
Sales: No
Branding: Yes

Social Media

Cost: $$
Description: Engaging with your audience on social media platforms can improve engagement and build loyal customers. However, mostly nofollow links or behind logins, providing little SEO.
Search Rankings: No
Traffic: Yes
Sales: No
Branding: Yes

On Page SEO

Cost: $$
Description: Spending some time and money on fixing your onsite SEO will provide a better foundation for the links you build for improved ranking results.
Search Rankings: Yes
Traffic: No
Sales: No
Branding: No

Local Search

Cost: $$
Description: Appearing in local sites such as Yelp and Merchant Circle, for real world stores, will improve sales completed offline.
Search Rankings: Yes
Traffic: No
Sales: Yes
Branding: Yes

Corporate Blog

Cost: $$
Description: Regularly updating a blog on your website can build your brand as an expert, attract long tail search terms and increase the traffic visiting your website.
Search Rankings: Yes
Traffic: Yes
Sales: No
Branding: Yes

Conversion Rate Optimization

Cost: $$
Description: CRO aims to get more business from your current website traffic by improving the website’s call to action and goal funnel.
Search Rankings: No
Traffic: No
Sales: Yes
Branding: No

Link Building

Cost: $$$
Description: Finding and contacting relevant, high quality websites to suggest your website for them to link to also. Provides great SEO benefit, as well as high quality traffic.
Search Rankings: Yes
Traffic: Yes
Sales: Yes
Branding: No

Viral Content

Cost: $$$
Description: Creating interesting content that others will be interested in and share via social media and blogs. Increases brand exposure and builds backlinks.
Search Rankings: Yes
Traffic: Yes
Sales: No
Branding: Yes

Paid Text Links

Cost: $$$$
Description: Buying links on strong websites can be good advertising leading to traffic, sales and branding. However, if links are dofollow this can be penalized by Search Engines.
Search Rankings: No
Traffic: Yes
Sales: Yes
Branding: Yes

Pay-Per-Click Advertising

Cost: $$$$$
Description: You can cut out SEO entirely and pay for visits using PPC. However, as soon as your budget ends, so does the website traffic.
Search Rankings: No
Traffic: Yes
Sales: Yes
Branding: Yes

Tell us about how you track ROI and the benefits you attribute to your marketing efforts in the comments below!

Jason Hendricks

Jason got his start in search engine optimization with his first company, Tidal Wave Media, and achieved top rankings for his clients and his own websites since 2001 before joining Vertical Measures. He handles technical SEO as well as web development projects for the company.

Continuing my blog posts on using Google Analytics to make your online marketing measurable, the topic of measuring the actual performance of the website content itself can be much harder to calculate. After all there may be any number of reasons why you have content on your site. It may be there to inform and educate customers to reduce your customer service costs. It might also be that the content is there for the whole purpose of link building, to attract links and increase the authority of your website and improve the rankings of other pages for targeted keywords.

However, for the purpose of this article, we are going to assume that the content on the page is for the sole purpose of persuading visitors to perform the goal of your website, be that to sell products, receive emails enquiring about your products, or subscribe to your service. However, even this isn’t simple or obvious to calculate. For example, a website visitor might read 5 pages of your website and then subscribe to your emails, but which piece of content persuaded them to do so? The first page, the last page, or all of them equally?

While you may never know the answers to some of these questions, the information available to you in Google Analytics can certainly help in understanding how visitors use your website content to fulfill your websites goals. I have covered setting up goals in analytics before, so I won’t do that again here, but it is crucial that you not only set these up correctly, but give them a monetary value. Not only does this help for measuring content performance, but also for understanding the value of everything you do, from traffic sources, keywords etc.

There are a number of reports in the Content section of Google Analytics, which show some standard metrics like the top landing and exit pages, as well as breaking down the content by URL, Title, or the most popular subdirectories. Again, the purpose of this post is not to outline each of these individually, as it is pretty intuitive.

However, the ‘Top Content’ report is the one that I primarily use to see the performance of each individual page. This reports the normal information of time on site, page views, bounce rate etc, but the metric we are most interested in for the purpose of Goal performance is the $ Index;

$ Index is explained well in the Analytics Conversion University but is essentially a way of ranking pages (high numbers are good), although the numbers themselves don’t particularly mean anything or provide insight. However, it is calculated as follows;

(Revenue + Goal Value)/Unique Views of Page Before Conversion = $ Index

By ranking your content in this way, you can see which pages are having the greater affect on conversions in persuading your visitors to do the action you want them to do.

It might be that certain pages on your site are great at converting; you just aren’t directing enough of them to that particular page, and are hidden away from easy navigation. For example, in the following diagram, everyone who visits the ‘Features’ page converts, so you may wish to consider directing visitors to this more easily, or moving this content onto the homepage itself.

However, because of how the $ Index works, it is unable to provide the more comprehensive information that I, and other website owners, would like. For example, you don’t know how big a part that content played in the conversion, or if it was merely on the path to conversion, where they stayed for a couple of seconds. Ranking solely by $ Index can also leave you at risk to content being highly ranked due to small sample sizes.

However, more detailed information is available in Google Analytics, you just have to dig a little deeper to find it.

To do this, you have to create custom reports, located at the bottom of the left hand navigation, and select ‘Manage Custom Reports’ and then ‘Create New’. The potential options open to you within these custom reports is much more in depth and almost endless to find the information that would be most useful for your business. However, for the purposes of this article, I would recommend choosing just from the ‘Goals’ metrics (the column titles) and the ‘Content’ dimensions (the rows of each report), as shown in the image to the right (click to enlarge).

You then have to drag and drop the information you want into the main screen on the page. For example, in the following example, the report will show various goal metrics for each landing page. You are almost unlimited in terms of information available, and can create addition sub-dimensions and tabs (although some combinations of metrics and dimensions aren’t possible in Google Analytics).

Now armed with this information you are able to make smarter decisions about your website and its content. The best landing pages for archiving different goals, the pages which improve conversion compared to when they aren’t visited and so on. For example, one report I have previously created and use, shown below, shows me much more information about the pages on a website and their impact on conversions, from absolute quantities, monetary value and conversion rate.

This can help you better understand what your visitors are on your website to see, and the information they feel they need to make a purchase or subscribe to your feed. In this way you can not only make your website perform better, but also create happier, more loyal, website visitors.

James Constable

James is a Campaign Manager at Vertical Measures, looking at client’s Internet Marketing from a strategic viewpoint to get them the best possible results for their business needs and budget. His blog posts revolve around strategy, analytics and keyword selection.

Hiring an Internet marketing company can be a daunting task. You have heard that businesses need website marketing, but aren’t even entirely sure what SEO stands for and you certainly don’t have time to research and educate yourself in the industry. There are a few quick things that you can do to at least appear knowledgeable and know what to look for in a good, honest Internet marketing company. It all starts with asking the right questions. Here are some initial questions that you should ask when interviewing SEO and internet marketing companies:

A great way to tell if a website marketing company knows what they’re doing is by looking at its website. If the company is implementing a great website marketing campaign, then it’s pretty likely that it can do it for you too. Practice what you preach right? Here are 15 questions to ask when interviewing an Internet marketing company:

1. How long has your company been in business? What is your experience? Internet marketing is a new and growing industry, so don’t expect to hear 20 years of experience. But, a background in traditional marketing, other website and internet businesses and related fields serve as solid background of experience.
2. How do you determine the best services for a particular company and website? Website marketing shouldn’t have a one size fits all approach. Each business needs a customized campaign, unique to its business goals and industry.
3. What kinds of SEO techniques do you use? Just like with any industry, there are companies that operate unethically. Watch out for companies that will launch you to the top of the search results by purchasing you thousands of links. The search engines will penalize a site that is using unethical, black-hat techniques.
4. What’s your link building process? Links continue to prevail as one of the most important factors in search engine rankings. An Internet marketing company should have a variety of link building techniques, such as press release marketing, blog posts or social media. This SEO Infographic for Link Data Visualization describes the various link building techniques as well as their value.
   
5. How many employees does the company have and what is their background/website experience? An Internet marketing company should have knowledgeable staff that knows its way around a website. Look for a company that has at least a few employees that have backgrounds in building websites on the various platforms.
6. Do you offer both on-site and off-site search engine optimization? It all starts with good optimization of your website. Look for a company that can advise you on good on-site optimization.
7. Can you guarantee the 1^st spot on Google? If the company says yes, then run! This can never be guaranteed.
8. How long will it take to get search engine results? Again, if the company claims it can guarantee you results within a week, or even a month, run! It typically takes three to six months.
9. What is your reporting process? A company should provide you with reports on a regular basis, showing you the progress and results of your campaign. If the company says it doesn’t provide reports or at least communicate the results in some form and you haven’t already run away, definitely run this time.
10. How can I expect to communicate with you? Make sure that the company communicates in a way that you are comfortable with and is willing to be flexible. If you would like a monthly phone call or email report, that is a reasonable request on your part.
11. Will you provide detailed information about your recommendations and the reasoning behind them? A company shouldn’t just hand you a contract full of services without an explanation. Be sure to look it over and have a conversation about why these services are best for your site and for your company.
12. Who owns the copyright? Internet marketing often involves web content development and the creation of social profiles. You, the client, should always be the sole owner of the work that the company completes for you.
13. What primary tactics do you use to increase a website’s rankings? Look for a company that uses a variety of tactics that are in line with the current trends of the industry. Internet marketing is constantly changing and evolving, and companies should adapt to those changes.
14. Can you show me examples of your previous work and share some success stories? In most cases, companies will have non-disclosure agreements with its clients, so it’s reasonable for the company to not be able to share information such as the company name and website. However often times the company should have happy clients that are willing to give recommendations and testimonials.
15. What is your involvement in the Internet marketing/SEO community? There are conferences, associations and groups all throughout the country for SEOs and Internet marketers to share ideas and keep up with the latest trends. Look for a company that plays an active role in that community.

Just as you would, when hiring any vendor for your company, check references and reviews. Unfortunately, in the Internet marketing industry there is a lot of fraud and many unethical companies out there. But, there are also companies that are truly passionate about Internet marketing and SEO, one of those being Vertical Measures of course!

Sarah Moraes

Sarah Moraes, Marketing Manager, heads the tactical planning and implementation of cross-platform marketing activities for Vertical Measures including; blogging, social media marketing, webinars, content marketing, email marketing and promotions. In addition, she published the Local Search Marketing for Business How-To-Guide, a part of the Vertical Measures How-To-Guide Series.

+Sarah Moraes

Website – Twitter – Facebook – More Posts

If your business is pursuing any form of online marketing, then it is likely that you have tried to work out your return on investment; the amount of sales that you can directly attribute to certain activities versus their costs. Whilst this kind of activity isn’t simple, it is possible to get an approximate figure and justify your online advertisement spend as you move from offline advertising to online, where people are spending an increasing amount of their leisure time.

Like with almost any kind of advertising, the results cannot be wholly measured. In the same way that it is hard to measure the effectiveness of a TV spot or newspaper print advertisement, it can be hard to completely measure the impact of online advertising. For example, web users may see your brand in a number of locations, building up an idea of your business and visiting an offline location as a result.

However, online marketing is more quantifiable than the ‘traditional media’ methods of advertising. With Google Analytics, businesses are able to track visitors from other websites and search engines to get an idea of the amount of traffic and sales that can be attributed to online marketing, depending on the type of internet marketing service being performed.

Before we get into the specifics, first note that to get the best results either e-commerce or goals should be set up correctly in your Analytics program. Even if your site isn’t e-commerce in nature, it should still have clearly defined goals and have a dollar value attached for each conversion. If the goal, or purpose, of your website is to have people sign up for a newsletter, and you know that 1 in every 50 subscribers will purchase a $50 service offline, then you can value each new newsletter subscriber at $1. Without having a dollar value attached, your analytics program can only calculate the number of customers gained, not their value.

Pay Per Click

PPC or Adwords campaigns are the most quantifiable form of advertising and can be easily tracked by linking your Adwords and Google Analytics accounts. This then produces a new report within the ‘Traffic Sources’ section aptly called ‘Adwords’ to review the traffic sent from paid Google listings. By clicking on the ‘Clicks’ tab of any of these reports users can get a complete breakdown of revenue, costs and ROI;

However, even this information isn’t entirely accurate and needs to be understood in context. What if searchers see your listing and go to your site directly or remember your brand name, for subsequent visits, without clicking on the advert? What about visitors who click the listing, but don’t purchase until several days later on a different computer or having cleared their cookies?

The information is by no means 100% accurate, but it is certainly a good starting point.

Organic SEO

Of course at Vertical Measures we’re more interested in the results of organic listings in search engines (we don’t offer PPC services here), which is trickier if only for the fact that Analytics doesn’t know how much you are spending on your efforts to rank for different keywords. However, if you keep track of how much you are spending on your organic SEO campaign, you can use this data in conjunction with the information in Analytics to get similar data of PPC.

So that you can be sure you’re only looking at organic search traffic, you need to select the ‘Non-paid Search Traffic’ from the Advanced Segments in the top right corner of your screen. This will update every report you look at to include only this information, so be sure to change it back to ‘All Visits’ when you are done.

Now that you are looking at only this information, find the value of this traffic by going to your E-Commerce or Goal Value reports to see the number and value of visits attributable to your organic effort.

You can then get even more granular by looking at individual keywords in the Keyword Report within ‘Traffic Sources’ in the left hand navigation. This report should look very similar to the reports you have for AdWords – only without your costs. Using this data you can see the value of each visit, the number of visits you received and how well they converted. You can then combine this with your separate SEO spending figures to see your cost per click and ROI for each keyword.

However, where it gets difficult is in the long tail, or terms you are not directly targeting. Having great content is likely to bring in traffic from a variety of keywords; don’t neglect to include this in your calculations! If you have been targeting just the keyword ‘desks’ and ‘mahogany desks’ is bringing in traffic, don’t exclude this from your ROI calculations.

In exchange for the slightly less measurable results of organic search results compared to PPC, it does have one huge advantage in that it is a long term strategy that will continue to pay dividends. As we like to say here, PPC is renting the house, SEO is owning the home. Whilst you may spend a lot one month on SEO and not see traffic increase accordingly, being ranked highly in SERPs will last for the foreseeable future and continue to send traffic to your site. You will then continue to receive traffic even if you don’t invest in SEO one month, whereas with PPC once you’ve spent your budget the traffic comes to a grinding halt.

Social Media

Another area of Internet Marketing that many businesses would like to see a measurable return on investment is in their social media efforts. As with PPC and SEO, It is  possible to get a rough idea of how your efforts in this area are performing via Google Analytics. Make sure you are looking at ‘All Visits’ in the Advanced Segments, and then go to the Referring Sites report in Traffic Sources. Next click on the Goal or E-commerce tab for the following information;

This report again shows the number of visits, the conversion rate and per visit value, helping you to identify where the best traffic is coming from and understand the return on your investment for your efforts in these areas. When you scan this list of websites look out for not only websites like ‘twitter.com’ but also any URL shorteners or twitter clients such as ‘hootsuite.com’, ‘ht.ly’, and ‘ow.ly’ in the screenshot above.

Again, the area where this kind of quantitative return on investment calculation falls down is that sometimes the rewards of social media aren’t always obvious. Much like TV advertising, the goal in having a strong following on social media is primarily to build brand awareness that may then result in customers knowing your brand to help you to stand out from your competition. Judging your efforts by direct goal conversions alone can be dangerous and lead you to cut back in areas that are meeting their goals.

Conclusion

To conclude, measuring ROI for your internet marketing is possible, but it isn’t an exact science. Like with TV and print advertising of the past, the full rewards are not directly attributable, such as brand awareness and recognition. You also need to fully understand how Google Analytics (or your analytics program) treats campaign conversion attribution (Click here and watch Slide 10).

However, despite these few restrictions, by digging into your analytics you are able to directly attribute revenue to your internet marketing. With information on clicks and sales from PPC, organic search, and social media, you can allocate spending to only the beneficial areas to get the most impact on your bottom line, gaining a competitive advantage over your competitors.

If you would like to see greater ROI on your internet marketing efforts, you could contact us or look at our website marketing services to identify the areas where your online business can be improved.

James Constable

James is a Campaign Manager at Vertical Measures, looking at client’s Internet Marketing from a strategic viewpoint to get them the best possible results for their business needs and budget. His blog posts revolve around strategy, analytics and keyword selection.