What are you doing to measure your bottom line?

How are you already measuring Return on Investment (ROI)?

If you are already paying for direct mailings or yellow page advertising, do you have a method to figure out how much extra business is coming in from each ad? The easiest way to measure ROI is with a basic formula: income – cost = profit or ROI. Basic enough, spend $500 on ads, receive $1,000 increase in business, the ROI is 100% ($1,000 – $500=$500) PROFIT. But do you REALLY know that the extra business came from the ONE yellow page or radio ad?

This basic formula is only a part of measuring the ROI. The major difference in creating online content vs traditional advertising is longevity! Pay $500 per ad and poof your ad is gone the next month. Create a video with the same budget and it lasts forever. With SEO, your ranking will remain fairly stable over time (depending on the competitiveness of your keywords). The value of permanent content is tricky to determine, but consider this: if you were to pay the same $1,500 -$3,000 a month that you may be spending on ads and billboards, with permanent web services, think about the web presence you will have built over as little as a year.

What is your FOCUS?

When measuring ROI during an online marketing program, you must consider what your short term and long term goals are. If you have a tight budget, this is an especially important question. You must decide how to invest your money. Do you spend a small amount on multiple services such as, videos, social media, state and local SEO, etc? Or do you put your budget into a long term video campaign? Perhaps you want to commit a large social media promotion with Facebook ads and discounts to generate repeat business. Whatever the case, how you spend your money will significantly effect what sort of pattern your ROI will have. Spreading your money out evenly will tend to produce slower ROI’s in the beginning, snowballing into higher sales later. The reverse is true with putting your money entirely into one service, such as Social Media. We at VISAO Solutions, believe that no matter what, you should always have a little SEO involved in any program because it doesn’t really make sense having awesome content if no one can find it..

What can you see ON PAPER, that can help determine potential ROI?

There are many tools on the web for determining traffic. We tend to use Google Analytics and similar tools for determining your estimated ROI. Using this tool we can tell how much traffic is being driven to your site. Through e-commerce funtions you can determine sales conversion rates as well.

At the end of a successful 12 month program there will be a significant curve in your analytics and traffic graph. We take this information and calculate it against annual sales figures and we will be able to determine the final ROI for your program.

How can you create ROI projections?

According to AOL and private eye-tracking studies, 47% of traffic will go to the page link (URL) ranked first on the search engine results page (SERP). The traffic and click-through percentages drop dramatically from there. We use this information to determine the average traffic you can expect while being ranked on the first page. This average is then weighed against the average traffic for your keywords, and then applied to a sales conversion formula. The average number of sales over the average number of visitors is the sales conversion. This can vary from 1% to as high as 8% depending on the industry.

This is just one way of evaluating your potential return on investment for SEO. There is also an immeasurable value in video SEO, article optimization, as well as the repeat business you can build using Social Media Marketing (SMM). Your videos that rank in the SERPs will result in more traffic and higher sales conversions and in many instances, your results will be better with video rankings than with just URL rankings alone. You must also take into account your website design and content. You could be receiving millions of hits a day, but still convert very few sales if your content is not conducive to the customers needs. Video blogging, as well as traditional blogging, is one of the best ways to gain credibility and earn respect for your business. Combining your blog and video blog into your social media strategy is also a very powerful tactic to gaining repeat business and a more credible reputation.