What is ROI?

Return on investment refers to the result from money being outlaid for a (generally) business endeavour. In internet marketing, ROI refers the success or otherwise of a marketing campaign and it is used as a measure of whether the cost of the campaign can be justified by the profits or returns from the campaign. This is most often used when people are analysing the success or otherwise of a Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising campaign. When you pay for each click through from your ads, you don’t want to be spending a lot of money on something that will have little profitable return.

Should you be measuring ROI?

The simple answer is yes. If you spend money on advertising and it costs you more money that it brings in, then you need to understand why. The money you are outlaying should be working hard to maximise your business profits, which means you need to look carefully at what steps you could take to ensure that this happens. Your PPC campaign for example, may need to be analysed to look at whether it generates better results at different times of the day, days of the week or in different geographic regions. This analysis of your internet marketing ROI will provide you with the kind of data that you need to refine the advertisements you have on offer.

Options for measuring ROI online

The use of analytics is the key way in which ROI is measured to improve online marketing efforts. Analytics can help you to measure a number of different factors that are important to ensure that you achieve the results you require to make your business a success. If you carry out a PPC advertising campaign, then you may wish to use the analytics on that campaign to run different versions of your ads and assess which are more successful. That will help you to determine which combinations of keywords in your ads generate the highest amount of traffic and also the highest level of converting traffic. If you are running a campaign then you need to be producing results from the ads that you are placing online. PPC by its very nature costs you money each time someone clicks on your ad. If the internet marketing ROI is not going well and your ads are bringing in little revenue, then you want to be on top of this right away.

Taking action to improve internet marketing ROI

If your ROI is not looking as great as you would like it to be, there are a range of things you could do to improve this. Among the most important are the following -

Select more specific keywords – If the keywords you are using are bringing in a lot of visitors with a general interest about the products or services you are selling, then you need to improve the quality of the traffic you are getting. By choosing more specific words and sending out a more targeted message in your ad campaign, you’ll have more success attracting and selling to your target audience

Reduce the cost of the adverts you are running – If you can fine tune your ads to target the audience you are after, this will help reduce the cost of the ads as you will be offsetting them with sales, however you can do more. The words you use for your PPC (especially with AdWords) have a value attached to them. If you could create campaigns with less expensive words that generate strong results, then you will improve the number of sales you get in proportion to the click through rate on your PPC ads, which means a better ROI for your campaign.

Ensure that your ads match up with the pages they lead to – If you find that you get a strong response but you lose people quickly when they arrive at your site, then you may want to look at improving the page that visitors to your site arrive at. When the page where people arrive is not strong, then you will quickly lose their interest before you really have a chance to sell your products and services.

Through the use of careful strategies that take into consideration the internet marketing ROI of your ad campaign and the way it ties in to your website, you can boost your profits successfully. Should you be having any problems, then seeking help or finding ways to improve your campaign will be the first step to increasing your success online and ensuring that you have a solid return on investment.

To your massive success

Guy

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