Chapter6.Measure Your Web Site s Success

Chapter 6. Measure Your Web Site's Success

Search marketing is not an end in itself. The purpose of search marketing is to drive traffic to your site so your site can reach its goals. Before you can concentrate on search marketing, however, you need to know how to measure your Web site's success. Only by measuring your site's success can you prove the business case for search marketing.

Beyond the business case, metrics are important to any activity that you intend to continuously improve. Management guru Peter Drucker's famous quote, "If you can't measure it, you can't manage it," could easily have been coined for the Web, where seemingly everything is measurable. Metrics are the lifeblood of any ongoing marketing campaign, including search marketing. In the preceding chapter, we looked at your Web site's goals. Now we show how you measure success at achieving those goals. This chapter covers the following topics:

• Counting conversions. Every time a visitor achieves your Web site's goal (buying something, entering contact information, donating to your campaign, and so on), you have converted that person from a mere visitor to someone having a new relationship with your organization (a customer, a lead, a donor, and so forth). The first step in measurement is to identify what the right conversions are for your business and to accurately count them.

• Counting visitors. Just knowing the number of conversions does not tell you enough. What you really want to know is what percentage of visitors you convert. You can figure that out only by carefully counting visitors, too.

• Counting dollars. The most persuasive thing to count is dollarsthe extra revenue you earn due to search engine marketing. You can learn to translate into dollars the impact of every visitor who converts, using those dollars as justification for your search marketing efforts.

Even if you are not really a "numbers person," you can learn to quantify what visitors do into extra revenue for you. Let's start with most critical site metric by counting conversions of your visitors.