Chris Anders - Internet Strategy Consultant

Introduction: Setting Internet Marketing Goals

It is very common for smaller organisations to measure their online "success" purely by the number of visitors their website receives.

Many organisations make the mistake of trying to get as many people as possible to view their website. If your website traffic is growing it can indeed often be good news. However if you are paying to appear in directories, advertising on Google or Yahoo or participating in any other paid for promotion then more traffic is not necessarily good! It depends on what those visitors go on to do.

As in any marketing endeavour the goal of your online marketing campaign should be to boost sales, get people to sign up to your service or whatever it is you are promoting. This is referred to as "conversion". The goal of an online marketing campaign should therefore be to increase the number of conversions on your site. If you are offering a range of products for sale you may also want to try and boost the value of conversions - ie get people to buy goods or sign up for more profitable products. Together these goals are commonly referred to as the "quality" of the visitors that come to your site.

If you are serious about wanting to do well online you'll need to commit to doing some research, developing a good site and then marketing it well. A lot of the work will obviously occur during the setup phase but you will need an ongoing committment to keeping your site up to date and also monitoring how both your site and online marketing campaigns are performing and revising them as necessary. This obviously costs money - either your time or fees for whoever is managing your site and / or marketing campaigns. You're also very likely to be paying for advertising on Google or with other search engine marketing programmes.

If the end result of all of the above is that you think you have a great site and no-one ever visits it then clearly you are not going to see a return on your investment and a lot of effort will have gone to waste. However, an equally worrying situation would be that your work and ongoing marketing drives a lot of traffic to your site but no-one ever buys anything. Over time in the latter scenario if you are paying a fair bit in ongoing marketing costs you may actually start to lose a fair bit of money.

Online marketing in some ways has a number of similarities to direct marketing. Done well it is all about constantly monitoring what people do on your site, identifying problems, coming up with ideas to resolve them and then testing them to see if your ideas work.

In setting goals for your site therefore you need to think about them financially wherever possible. Think for example about how much profit you make on an average sale. If you are selling a product and make an average of £20 profit on each item sold then if it costs about £5 in marketing costs to get a new customer online then you are still making a decent £15 for each sale. However if its costing £5 for each new customer for a different product where you only make a profit of £2.50 then clearly you are going to lose money and you will need to revisit your strategy. Spend some time thinking about what are reasonable "customer acquisition costs" for the products or services you offer.

In some cases it's very difficult or impossible to monetarise goals as we did in the example above. In these cases you need to think about other goals that you can monitor. For example if you are running a campaign you may want to think about monitoring how long people stay on your site, how many pages they read and maybe about how many sign a petition or contact you for further information.

Detailed advice on setting goals will be covered in a future entry on this blog.