You've probably heard the business wisdom: "If you don't measure it, you can't manage it." Until recently that's been one of the dilemmas for many marketing organizations. Much of marketing was too subjective, difficult, or expensive to measure. Even when measurable, the results came in too late to act on.

While that still might be true for many of the offline activities that marketing departments manage, it's not the case when marketing on the Internet. In fact, online marketing is a marketing person's dream. Everything is measurable from online sales and lead form submissions to actual phone calls.

Having said that, just because something is measurable doesn't mean someone actually measures it. At Exclusive Concepts, however, we believe in measuring everything. It's part of our corporate philosophy to expect our clients to hold us accountable for results. If we can't show you how our services provide real improvements to your business with a measurable ROI, then we don't expect you to keep doing business with us. It's that simple.

As an example, let's look at measurement possibilities associated with an online lead generated through your Website.

Step 1: Get Traffic
The first thing to do is acquire visitors. And, not just any visitor, but rather someone who's actually interested in the product or services you provide AND is in the process of acquiring a solution. Where do you find such prospects? Search engine are a great source. If someone is using Google, Yahoo, MSN or one of the other search engines to find information, they have declared themselves a likely prospect by using a search term that relates to what you sell.

There are two ways to make sure prospects find your Website and give you an opportunity to educate them on your value proposition, differentiation, benefits, etc. You can have your site listed prominently of the search engine's search results, and/or you can place an ad on those same search results pages that will appear whenever someone searches on terms relevant to your business.

These two tactics have been proven to be effective means to attract high volumes of qualified traffic to your Website. More details on this process are available on our Search Engine Marketing Primer page.

Step 2: Convert Traffic into Action
Once you have qualified visitors, you'll want to convert them into paying customers at the highest rate possible. That means making sure your Website provides the kind of information, promotion, navigation and messaging that will entice a customer to take the next step.

Again, the wonder of Internet marketing is that with the proper tools, every step of the transaction, from click to sale, can be measured. Working with Exclusive Concepts, you will know the source of the customer (search engine, keyword, other sites, email campaign, newsletters, etc.) and also which pages of your Website generated the greatest number of sales or leads. We can even tell where on your Website people left without taking action, and with this knowledge can eliminate ineffective pages.

This information can be used to enhance your site's ability to convert visitors into sales/leads, as well as providing data that can be used to more effectively manage your pay-per-click campaign. By learning which keywords and ads on various search engines generate the best results, you can determine where your dollars will be better spent. You can also evaluate which ads are working and consider new ad copy and keywords to replace those that aren't producing.

All this is possible because we can measure results end-to-end in real-time. What an edge this provides for making marketing decisions!
 
Bonus: By turning your Website into a highly responsive and measurable marketing platform, it can be transformed into means to test messaging, collateral concepts and offline marketing copy, saving you even more money. In addition, Internet marketing allows for changing ad copy and keywords to take advantage of seasonal opportunities, new product announcements, special promotions, etc.
 
Summary
The beauty of online marketing is that every activity discussed above is measurable specifically and in real-time. You don't just get a sampling of data, you get all the information on every transaction. These measurements can then be analyzed and adjustments can be made that will incrementally improve your approach until you find you've achieved optimal results in the shortest time possible.

The ability to act quickly based on real-time data, coupled with the reach of the Internet, makes measurable online marketing critical to the future success of every business. Make sure this ability is working for you in your online marketing.