This question was addressed in a different way – “Measuring The Cost of Bad or Good Online Marketing” – by Cece Salomon-Lee on PR Meets Marketing. Also an interesting article.

Cece offers some good advice: “start simply – take the most simple measurement and build upon it over time. Otherwise, you may find yourself spending more time assembling reports about your online reputation versus managing it directly.”

This question was addressed in a different way – “Measuring The Cost of Bad or Good Online Marketing” – by Cece Salomon-Lee on PR Meets Marketing. Also an interesting article.

Cece offers some good advice: “start simply – take the most simple measurement and build upon it over time. Otherwise, you may find yourself spending more time assembling reports about your online reputation versus managing it directly.”

If you are e-commerce it gets even easier as you can track which hits become sales. If you transaction takes place offline you can look at the traffic to your online presecence and compare it with your sales growth to get a rough guide if you are getting a good ROI.

However as with all metrics many companies will continue to ignore the ones they don’t like – see Phillip Van Peborghs comment about trade shows above. In the same way weak marketers will continue to bluff their way through the ROI and measurability arguments.

For the rest of us this is a huge potential advantage – get your analytics set up now and measure your traffic, for the first time this will give you tangible figures to present to your clients and to improve your own efforts. Just remember the only figure the client will ever be interested in is sales and bear this in mind when choosing which metrics to focus on.

If you are e-commerce it gets even easier as you can track which hits become sales. If you transaction takes place offline you can look at the traffic to your online presecence and compare it with your sales growth to get a rough guide if you are getting a good ROI.

However as with all metrics many companies will continue to ignore the ones they don’t like – see Phillip Van Peborghs comment about trade shows above. In the same way weak marketers will continue to bluff their way through the ROI and measurability arguments.

For the rest of us this is a huge potential advantage – get your analytics set up now and measure your traffic, for the first time this will give you tangible figures to present to your clients and to improve your own efforts. Just remember the only figure the client will ever be interested in is sales and bear this in mind when choosing which metrics to focus on.