Increase Your Profits with Online Marketing

The single most important reason is this: online marketing is 100% measurable and accountable.  When you market your business on the Internet, you know exactly where every penny is going and what you’re getting for it.  It’s always good to know those things, but when profits are on the line, it’s absolutely critical.

When you spend money on Internet advertising, you can track your results on a microlevel.  You can direct your advertisements toward the right people, and you’ll know exactly how many people responded to your ad.

Online marketing gives you measurement tools that don’t exist in any other medium.  When you learn how to use those online tools, you can create a profitable marketing campaign, no matter what happens to the economy.

The most common form of online marketing is pay-per-click advertising through a service like Google AdWords.  When you use AdWords, you choose the keywords you think your customers are looking for, and you choose how much you’re willing to spend to attract those customers.  AdWords displays your ad when Google users search for your keywords.  The more you’re willing to spend, the more prominently your ad is displayed. 

When a Google user clicks your ad, you pay a fee to Google. After someone clicks your ad, you can follow their activity on your Website to find out if they respond to your initial offer. If they do, you’ll be able to keep track of them in the long term.  In fact, you can make note of every dollar they spend with you and trace it back to your Internet ad.

There are four key statistics you need to track when you begin an online marketing campaign:

Cost per visitor:  This is the average fee paid to Google (or another pay-per-click service) for each click on an advertisement that sends a visitor to your website.  Cost per click can be broken down by keyword or advertisement, or aggregated for an entire marketing campaign—that’s true of these other statistics as well.

Cost per lead:  The clients I work with don’t try to close a sale as soon as they get a website visitor—they use their Website to collect information from their visitors, in return for a small free product or service.  When Website visitors provide their contact information, they become sales leads, so your cost per lead is what you’re spending for each person who clicks on your ad, visits your Website, and “opts in” by giving you his or her email address or phone number.

Cost per sale: Cost per sale is just what it sounds like—the amount you’re spending on marketing for each sale you close.

Total campaign ROI:  This is the number you should really care about.  How much did you spend on your campaign, and how much money did it generate for you?  With other media, you can only guess at that sort of thing, but if you’re marketing on the Internet, you can nail it down to the penny.

To ensure that you’re getting the maximum return on your investment in online marketing and churning profits, you have to test different approaches and choose the ones that work best for you.  This process is called optimization.

Test everything: ideas, strategies, offers, products, services, discounts, ad copy, keywords, and graphics. This way, you know what is cost effective. You can change the elements of your online marketing campaign in a matter of seconds, often at little or no expense.  Every improvement you make that increases your response rate, or that reduces waste, will result in increased profits.