I had a conversation with a client last week concerning an option to advertise their business. It went something along the lines of:
"We were contacted by the sales representative from the local newspaper wanting us to buy advertising space on their website. The sales representative said their site gets lots of hits and ranks really well in Google for a lot of search terms. All the top spots have already been sold but she said we could do okay if we were listed one of the community pages. Is this a good idea, would it be worth spending a couple of hundred dollars a month on some advertising?"
So how can you make an intelligent and informed decision and what do you need to have in place to ensure that you are not pouring money down a black hole? Where do you start?
There are three main issues need to address:
- How to evaluate any marketing / advertising spend
- How to measure visitors to your website
- How to calculate to cost of online advertising
These might sound complex, but are actually simpler than you think.
Continue Reading How to Evaluate Advertising / Marketing Options
1. How to evaluate ANY marketing / advertising spend?
To find out what advertising is working for you, you need to ask one simple question:
"How did you find out about us?"
There is no best way to do this, various clients keep notes in their booking diary (at point on enquiry), incorporate into their application form (at point of application). The key is to make a habit of asking the question.
By tracking where your customers come from, you can see where your customers are coming from. Your business data will be unique to you, but it might look like this:
The majority of businesses will not do this, but asking the question allows you see what is working and provide you with a competitive advantage in your marketing.
2. How to measure visitors to your website?
If you own a website, you should have a website statistics package to give you management information about your website performance.
A website statistics package is not a visitor counter.
A website statistics package is not a hit counter.
At a minimum, a website statistics package in place which will show you:
- Tracks visitors, not hits (when can be human or software)
- Exactly how many visitors come to your site (cumulative and monthly)
- How many came from
- search engines
- directories
- links
- What they typed into the search engine to find you.
- Trends over time.
A website statistic package is a standard feature of any McWebs website, and depending on your your requirements, we deploy Awstats or Google Analytics.
By having a web statistics / web analytics package in place, you will be able to see a snapshot of what is happening on your website and evaluate any online marketing spend.
3. How to calculate to cost of online advertising?
Website statistics provide you with the data required to measure visitors to your site.
This enables you to perform some simple analysis to see what is working for your site and calculate how much each visitors is costing you to get to your website. An example of this analysis may look like this.
The simple analysis allows you to make informed decisions on what is working for your website and allocate resources more intelligently and more effectively allocate your online marketing spend.
-
Source A:
If Source A brings 2 visitors (At a cost of $200), each visitor costs $100 to get to your site. -
Source B:
If Source B brings 1000 visitors (At a cost of $20), each visitor costs $0.20 to get to your site.
By calculating and monitoring costs per website visitor, you may be a better target your marketing investment towards activities that generate a greater return on investment.
