“What Am I Getting For The Money I Spend With You Guys?”
One of the first phrases I remember being taught in business school was “return on investment”. Simple phrase, easy
to understand, had to be to stick with me for the last few years right? Anyways, the phrase itself may seem elementary but things get tricky when trying to provide a sufficient answer and proving to the client that their money is being well-spent.
The beauty of being an internet marketer is that if you know what you’re doing, for the most part the work speaks for itself. I wish the best of luck to marketers trying to prove ROI’s for things like sponsoring a golf tournament, running a billboard ad or even just a simple flyer campaign. Now I understand that a marketing mix is important but I’m certainly not complaining about having the ability to provide in-depth statistics that backs up the work I do.
I was in a meeting with a client recently and after a brief discussion about our search engine optimization efforts the marketing director looked at me and said, “What am I getting for the money I spend with you guys?” Fair question, to the point, I loved it. Over the next hour I explained and showed him a mix of the following things…
“Before you weren’t there, now you are there, and this is the amount of traffic it’s bringing…” - Search engine optimization and organic rankings are fun to discuss. We use special software that tracks where a site ranked across the search engines when we started work and where it ranks when we’re finished. The analytics will speak for themselves with traffic increases and specifically increases in traffic from Google/Yahoo!/Bing. If you want to really fascinate the client you can even show them how many different phrases people use to search for their site, how many visitors are being brought by each phrase, how long they spent on the site, the pages they visited, etc. A top level analytics tool will also allow you to follow the organic traffic and track conversions (purchase, form filled out, etc.).
“Your ad shows up here and appears for all of these phrases. It was shown X times and received Y clicks at $Z/click last month.” - Pay-per-click campaigns are pretty cut and dry. The SE’s provide numbers on impressions/clicks for each key phrase and also the average position in which the ad was shown. Google also provides conversion tracking tools so you can follow a visitor from the time they are brought to your site until the time they “convert” (buy something, contact you, etc.).
Obviously this is the tip of the iceberg as far as online marketing strategies go but it’s Friday and I’m tired of writing! Many of the things mentioned above can also be tracked on banner advertising, email marketing, cost per lead campaigns, etc.
The ability to track online marketing efforts with great accuracy holds us very accountable as internet marketers. Good work will produce good results and will leave those skeptical marketing directors feeling much better about spending their money on the Internet.
