A lot of funds can be easily poured into Online Marketing and in most cases for the majority of organisations it is money well spent. There are different kinds of Online Marketing that may have been purchased and clearly the costs vary depending on which one has been picked. In the case of pay per click advertising, where an advert for the company appears in the “paid” advertising section of the search engine listings the cost is always calculated as a multiple of the number of searchers who actually click on the advert. If the attention is high this will mean that the cost of each click is high and therefore the number of clicks too, leading to a potentially high invoice. If on the other hand search engine optimization has been used then the search for a particular keyword should see the optimized site placed in the organic Search Engine Placement listing on page 1. This can cost an initial fee, followed a performance based £15 per keyword on page 1. So as we can see both of these options require investment.

It is therefore crucial that the organisation can recognise whether the Online Marketing is having a positive effect on business sales and if that effect is worth the spend. One way to do this of course is to monitor the sales figures closely and cross reference these chronologically with when the online marketing campaign began (or in the case of Search engine optimization, when the page 1 listings were achieved). Doing this will give a very clear picture, assuming all else is equal, of whether the investment is paying off.

If you learn that there is little or no change in these figures, do not simply stop the practice, there may be other issues that need sorting out in order to gain the benefits. Ensure you have web counters on each site. Preferably these will have been in place prior to the Online Marketing process was initiated so that you can see if the visitor numbers have increased. If you have one of the above average web counters you should also be able to see which pages visitors leave from. If the visitors numbers are much higher than before but your sales figures remain unaltered then there are a few things that could be wrong.

One is that you site does not offer the right information for the customer to buy, review which pages the customers leave from, is there something you could do to that text to make it “snappier”, to provoke a purchase, or an enquiry? These changes can be made almost straight away and the results seen straight away too, so you’ll know when you’ve got it right.

Another possibility is that the Keywords chosen for the optimization process could in fact be the wrong ones. Maybe the searchers keying in those specific keywords do not actually want the products on offer, or maybe they are merely not in the market for them yet and therefore are just browsing. If this is the case it is not as easily dealt with. If you used a Website Optimization Company to guide you should go back to them and explain the issue. They should offer to re-work the keyword listing for you, unfortunately it does mean repeating the whole process from start to finish.

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