Tracking ROI in Search Engine Marketing

August 20, 2004

With today’s competitive markets, accurately tracking your search engine marketing ROI (Return on Investment) is more important than ever. Whether you are using an in-house solution your company developed, or if you are using a third-party solution, carefully measuring your results could make or break your online ad budget.

Independently of which tracking solution or Web analytics package you use, in the end, you can make your data more valuable and more useful if you follow a few simple steps. Web traffic tracking solutions are also important in order for you to carefully measure your conversion rates. If you have visitors coming to your site but if they aren’t buying, they are not converting.

Start by double-checking your tracking reports
If you are mainly using a third party solution, this is for you. First, if you are using two different and competing solutions, don’t be alarmed if you see anywhere from a 5 to 10% difference in the measured results from the two competing vendors. This is considered normal in the industry, since different tracking software compute measured traffic in different ways. However, if you see inconsistencies of more than 15 or 20% or more, then this isn’t normal and you should investigate the real cause of such a discrepancy.

Also, if your in-house reporting tools don’t agree and come up with different numbers, again a 10% discrepancy figure would be deemed acceptable.

Get the most detailed traffic data you can
Most search engine marketers I know, including myself, spend a lot of time researching and identifying keywords, writing meta tags, title tags and description tags, etc. We also spend a fairly good amount of time designing new Web pages, placing new content and, most of all, building and designing landing pages that will convert well.

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Article written by Serge Thibodeau,
President & CEO,
Rank for $ales
Copyright (c) Serge Thibodeau 2004

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