Archives for February 2009

Impressions, page views, hits, visits, unique visitors, clicks, CTR, conversions… what do they all mean? Unless you can translate them into how you’re doing business, they’re just numbers… and pretty useless ones at that.  While using the Internet to help your business may be relatively cheap, you still should understand what efforts are working and which are not.  Most Internet strategies require iterative improvements to get the most out of them – and that means knowing where you’re making money and where you’re not.

Every statistic should be related to the money you’re making.  If you’re selling things online, this is a bit easier, since you can track how many sales you’re making and how much per sale versus how many page views, visits, clicks, etc.  If you’re using the Internet to advertise your products or services, hopefully you have some way to collect leads online – or at least track that they came from online.  Then you should be able to figure out how many leads you get for how many actual sales (your $), which you then can relate to how many page views, clicks, etc. it took to get those.

As an example, many clients think they are doing really well with Internet advertising, but when we take a look at how much money they’re getting per conversion, click, etc., we often find that they’re spending more per conversion than they’re selling their product for.  It’s often hard to see this at first glance because people tend to look at overall spending when deciding what’s working.  If I spend $500 per month on Google ads, but I make $5000 per month, I might not think that’s a bad return.  But if you take a closer look, you may be getting most of your sales from other places, and you’re spending $500/month and not actually making anything from that traffic (if you’re spending more than you’re getting).

We all have a limited amount of time in our day.  If you can attach dollars to your Internet statistics, it will help you understand where you need to make changes, what’s working, and how to move forward.

(photo by theritters @ Flickr CC)

Technorati tags: analytics, business, marketing, ROI, statistics