• Written by Tom Lauck, Creative-Ops

Common sense tells you that your website, an online tool to market your business, should integrate with your online marketing efforts. After all, your ads and listings use links to drive traffic to your website. But is your website ready to help you analyze each of the channels driving traffic to your site? And are you taking advantage of some basic metrics and online marketing tools to optimize the return on your advertising dollar?

Online marketing is a learning process. With each campaign you have the opportunity to learn more about which advertisements or promotions generate leads and help you close business. But to ensure consistency and repeatability, you need to structure campaigns so that they reveal their effectiveness. Let’s look at how to do that.

Building Your Campaign

Your online marketing campaign consists of four basic elements:

1. The ad
2. The link
3. The landing page
4. The conversion page

Each of these elements (as with all advertising campaigns) should be centered on an objective, such as lead generation, online sales, a newsletter sign-up, or something else. For maximum effectiveness, you structure your ad and website to accomplish that specific goal.

The sequence of a campaign typically looks like this:

• With your goals in mind, you develop an ad to grab the attention of a specific individual looking for your product or service.
• The consumer clicks on the ad and goes to your website to learn more about the information presented in your ad.
• The consumer acts, according to your objective, by either buying your product or service, or downloading a whitepaper, or whatever it was that was set out as the goal for the ad.
• You get the reward, whether it is a lead, sign-up, purchase, etc.

Adding Tracking

Now let’s say you’re creating this same sequence of steps across a variety of different channels — lead generation, pay-per-click, organic search, newsletter, etc. How can you tell which channels are doing the job, and are worth investing and reinvesting in? You do it by adding tracking.

Let’s look at the same set of steps, after adding some behind-the-scenes effort.

• With your goals in mind, you develop the ad to grab the attention of a specific individual looking for your product or service.
• The consumer clicks on the ad and goes to your website and learns more about the information that was just presented in your ad.
• The link itself has a tracking code embedded in it — in fact, every link does — so you can use a visitor tracking program to filter traffic from your marketing channels and report results to you by channel.
• The web page they land on, appropriately titled the “landing page” isn’t your homepage. Instead, it’s a page custom-designed to put someone clicking on an ad directly in front of the information you advertised.*
• The consumer buys your product or service, or does whatever it was that was set out as a goal for that ad (called a conversion). Your webmaster places a unique tracking code on your “thank you” page, or the page that a visitor would land on after completing the conversion.

Analyzing Results

Once this sequence of events is replicated for each advertisement and marketing channel, you or your webmaster can compare the quality of the leads and rates of conversion and determine which online campaigns are most effective at generating business for your company.
Don’t focus your energy on driving qualified traffic to your website and then leave them hanging; you know how they got to your site, you designed the ads… now give them what they were looking for and turn them into customers!

*If your ad is more general in nature, you can link to your homepage, but you need to put a variety of targeted “ads” on your own site that encourage the visitor to purchase, sign up or anything else that accomplishes your original goal.