How to Evaluate Your Online Marketing Strategy
This is a guest blog post by Charles Mburugu, a technology enthusiast who is currently writing for web design library.
Many small business owners and solo entrepreneurs use tactics such as pay-per-click advertising, search engine optimization and social media to promote their products or services. But having an online marketing strategy is not enough. You also need to evaluate that strategy and alter it from time to time.
The following ideas will help you evaluate your online marketing strategies for best results.
1. Measure your stats using Google Analytics
When it comes to Google Analytics, you should not just look at how much traffic you are attracting, but also its conversion rate. Other stats to consider are:
• Time on site – This refers to the amount of time a visitor spends on your site. You will be able to establish which sources bring in visitors who stay longer on your site.
• URL destination – This refers to the number of people visiting a particular page of your site.
• Page/visit – This refers to the number of pages a single person visits during one session. The higher, the better.
• Event – This refers to actions such as clicking on the play button, an outbound link or a download link.
2. Establish your site’s baseline.
The baseline of your site includes the following stats:
• Domain authority – This is a ranking of a site by SEOmoz on the basis of incoming links. A high domain authority means that you have better chances of ranking higher in your niche. To get this ranking, you need to open an account with SEOmoz.
• PageRank – This is a ranking of a site by Google on the basis of incoming links. You can check the PageRank of any site using free Google SEO tools. A quick check can also be done at PRchecker.
• Twitter followers – Check how many people are following you, as well as how many people you are following.
• Facebook fans and post views – Find out how many people ‘like’ your page, and track how that number changes over time. Also check the number of post views and comments.
• YouTube subscribers – If your business has a YouTube channel, find out how many subscribers you have and the number of views for uploaded videos.
• Keyword rankings – Find out how your top keywords are ranking.
3. Review your stats monthly.
Put down all your statistics on a spreadsheet. At least every month, update it with the most recent data. These records will help find out which aspects of your marketing campaign are more productive, and which aspects need to be improved.
4. Modify your marketing strategy
Using the information collected, you will be able to make improvements to your marketing strategy. For instance, if you ran a successful video contest or giveaway, it would make sense to run a new one. If a guest post in a specific site attracted a lot of traffic, you could consider submitting another post.
Evaluating and modifying your marketing strategy will ensure that your campaigns are more organized and successful.
How has your online marketing strategy evolved over the years? Let me know in the comments section below.
6 Responses to How to Evaluate Your Online Marketing Strategy
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Great! It’s important to evaluate your marketing strategy knowing that many online businesses today are establishing their names. I can say that don’t just do what others are doing, it’s better to have your own strategy.
Alex Mandossian recently posted…Do you have balls? The Marketing Online Hangout Replay
Hate to disagree with Alex, but sometimes it’s best not to re-invent the wheel. Many niches can have the same base strategy, with only a few changes. If you work in similar niches, I suggest making a swype sheet of what works and what doesn’t work, and then re-use this swype sheet within other niches. It’s better to have somewhere to start, then recreating from the beginning.
yep but how to target the mass market ? any tips on that
Great post, it’s really important to check your blog analytic and the source of traffic to your site. You must use the quality content on your blog to raise search traffic and to lower your site conversion rate.
ravi patel recently posted…Anushka Sharma or Deepika Padukone Opposite to Salman In Movie Kick?
Nice article covering the basics – often what happens especially in small businesses people tend to not “re-evaluate” or “re-visit” their overall marketing Strategy including their online marketing strategy. Things change, improve, become popular etc and a perfect example of that is Social Media…keep up with the times and make sure that you firstly have a good solid marketing strategy that covers online marketing and secondly don’t think that just because you have one that it doesn’t need to be evaluated and ‘tweeked’ often.
you have to have some knowledge of seo these days to rank anywhere in the search engines unless you have budgets for cost per click