A lot of funds can be easily poured into Online Marketing and in most cases for the majority of companies it is money spent wisely. There are different kinds of Online Marketing that may have been purchased and obviously the costs vary depending on which one has been used. In the case of pay per click advertising, where an advert for the company is listed in the “paid” advertising section of the search engine listings the cost is always worked out as a multiple of the number of searchers who actually click on the advert. If the attention is high this will mean that the cost of each click is high and of course the number of clicks too, leading to a potentially pricey invoice. If on the other hand search engine optimization has been used then the search for a particular keyword should see the optimized site placed in the organic Search Engine Placement listing on page 1. This can cost an initial fee, followed a performance based ?15 per keyword on page 1. So as we can see both of these options need investment.

It is therefore vital that the firm can spot whether the Online Marketing is having a positive effect on business sales and if that effect is worth the spend. One way to do this of course is to scrutinise the sales figures carefully and cross reference these chronologically with when the online marketing campaign began (or in the case of Search engine optimization, when the page 1 listings were achieved). Doing this will give a very clear sign, assuming all else is equal, of whether the investment is paying off.

If you ascertain that there is little or no change in these stats, do not simply stop the process, there may be other issues that need working through in order to gain the benefits. Ensure you have web counters on all your sites. Preferably these will have been in place before the Online Marketing process was initiated so that you can see if the visitor numbers have risen. If you have one of the decent web counters you should also be able to see which pages visitors leave from. If the visitors numbers are a lot higher than before but your sales figures remain unchanged then there are a few things that could be off beam.

One is that you site does not provide the right information for the customer to buy, review which pages the customers leave from, is there anything you could do to that text to make it “snappier”, to incite a purchase, or an enquiry? These changes can be made almost right away and the results seen straight away too, so you’ll know when you’ve got it on the right track.

Another possibility is that the Keywords selected for the optimization process could actually be the wrong ones. Maybe the searchers typing in those particular keywords do not actually want the goods on offer, or maybe they are simply not in the market for them yet and therefore are just browsing. If this is the case it is not as easily sorted out. If you used a search engine optimization company to guide you should go back to them and explain the problem. They should offer to re-work the keyword listing for you, however it does mean starting again with the optimization though.