Analyze Your Results
The Steps to Success
The old adage, “what gets measured gets managed”, applies to your online success as well.
Every ad channel’s results should be measured on three levels: How many visitors, leads and bookings did it
generate? Web professionals often talk about conversion
ratios. This is simply the percentage of users that continue to the next step. An example would be if your site
receives 1,000 unique (human) visitors a month and 40 of them requested
information or started a booking and then half of those actually completed a
booking. That would give your site a conversion rate of 2% (40/1,000 x 0.5).
Understanding the current conversion rate and constantly striving to improve it
is critical to your site’s success.
Taking the cost of each ad into
account makes it possible to calculate the ROI (Return on Investment)
of each channel. Obviously, ad campaigns with high ROI should be continued or
expanded, while poor performing ones should be suspended.
Common Challenges
While web analytics tools like Google Analytics can give you very
detailed information on the traffic your website receives, all the data can be
very confusing and daunting to analyze. Furthermore, things more specific to
your business such as the dollar value of your bookings are not being taken
into account. Another challenge is how to incorporate off-line advertising into
the mix. Asking web consumers how they heard about you in an online form often
produces mixed results and can only track leads who actually sign up on the
site, not anonymous visitors.
How Bookt Can Help
The Bookt platform is built from the bottom up with analysis and tracking in mind. All actions a user takes on
your website are tracked and the referral source of visitor (such as a search
engine query or paid ad link) is recorded. Through the use of URL keywords
(e.g. www.yoursite.com/adoffer01) visitors can be tracked from both offline and
online sources. In addition, it is possible to apply smart lead sourcing where
textboxes such as “How did you hear about us” only show up when no other
information is available (as in the case when they typed in your website’s URL
without any keyword straight into the browser address bar).
The Bookt management dashboard visualizes the data in a very simple but powerful way, giving you all the information you need to determine the effectiveness of your marketing.