Online marketing doesn’t happen in the real world. It happens online. Of course, the results of these efforts are online, too, and not always apparent. Because of that, they can be difficult for some people to understand. But there are marketing metrics connected to specific online activities that allow you to see the impact of your activities.
Below are three simple ways to tell if your online marketing is getting the results you want.
Search Results
If your goal is ranking high in online search, then the best place to see how your website is performing is in the search results.
Assuming your website has been search optimized, try searching for a keyword term from one of your web pages. You will very quickly see how well your site performs. If you’re not happy where your page ranks, talk to a SEO professional.
Google Analytics
If your goal is to get traffic to your site, then you will want to view the metrics from Google Analytics. Google developed this product to help website owners understand what was happening on their sites.
Google analytics starts with a piece of code that can be installed on a website. When it is, it records data about the traffic a site receives. At the Analytics dashboard, users can see the amount of traffic, where it came from, what visitors did when they reached the site and how long they stayed.
This is valuable information, especially if you are trying to determine how successful a certain campaign was.
Social Media Marketing Metrics
When working with social media, you can have several different goals. Most of my clients want to build awareness and move traffic to their website.
The good news is that social media sites supply metrics that tell you how your efforts are working.
Build Awareness
The best indicator to tell if you are building awareness for your brand is by checking Reach. This metric tells us how many people a particular post reached. It’s the bedrock metric for social media, because if you want to build awareness, your messaging must first reach people.
Reach statistics can be obtained in the Insights or Analytics section of your page. Most social sites will allow you to look at reach for the entire page for a certain period of time. You can view reach numbers for specific posts, as well.
However, this is where things get a little complicated. Organic reach on some sites, namely Facebook, has been greatly reduced for business pages. So to reach more people, you need to pay for it through boosted posts and advertisements.
Drive Traffic
When you use social media with a blog or website content strategy, you can create posts that link back to your company’s site. Facebook allows you too see if those links are getting clicks. But to find that data you have to dig for it.
Got to your page and click Insights. Then scroll down past the summary to the Posts section. When you see a post that you know linked back to your website, click on it. On the right side of the box that opens you will see an area called “Post Clicks.” Look for “Link Clicks” to see how many people clicked back to your site.
Check all your posts that have links to get a total number for a given period of time.
The Wrap
The metrics above are basic ways to tell if your online marketing is working. If you want to dog deeper, many sites provide in depth metrics.
Understanding how your efforts are performing is necessary to having a clear picture about what works and what does not. After all, if you don’t measure it, you can’t improve it.
If you want to learn more about marketing metrics, call me at 513-237-5530.
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Bob Turner is a Digital Marketing Consultant with RevLocal in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Bob Turner - Digital Marketing Thoughts 
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