One of the most significant pitfalls facing business managers and marketers today is the lack of a universal eBusiness metrics standard to gauge success and justify online investments of their time and money. To successfully measure your Web-based ROI, LTY brings you five basic principles of eBusiness Performance Management (eBPM) to help align your sites' Web performance with your overall business objectives. 

1. Start with Strategy
Know the top-level goals of your company inside and out and apply these to your eBusiness strategy. For example, these might include driving the cost of sales down, increasing brand awareness, growing revenues or improving customer satisfaction ratings. 

2. See Success
Envision up front how your Web initiatives can support your overall business objectives. Who is the target of your next eBusiness campaign? Who will it serve? Who do you expect to sell to? If your eMarketing program were an offline initiative instead, how would you measure it? 

3. Measure Early and Often 
Throughout the program, even hours after launch, it is important to assess results, even preliminary, so that execution can be fine-tuned throughout a campaign. Understanding results is not a "post mortem" task.

4. Design and Plan 
Plan for how your vast data reserves not only will be mined and stored, but how the company's key decision-makers can readily leverage data from disparate sources - e.g., customer databases used by sales and service, sales transaction records stored in the corporate mainframe, etc. - to complement your Web-based initiatives. 

5. Make it Real 
Share results - both successes and failures. eBusiness stakeholders - executives, line of business management, and others - must have access to critical information so that timely and accurate decisions can be made. Killing an unsuccessful Web-based program early can still be considered a "win." 

Peter Prestipino - 7Search.com Marketing Specialist
http://www.7Search.com is the second most trafficked bid for placement search engine on the Internet and provides consumers and webmasters an array of Web resources.

Use Web Site Analytics and
ROI Tracking to Fuel Your Success
In order to ensure your marketing investment is really an investment and not a money pit you need to identify your success metrics and find a way to measure them.

What do you want to achieve?
Chances are you're looking to increase sales, paid subscriptions, or affiliate revenue, increase the size of your mailing list, generate leads, or simply generate more page views to sell more advertising. Any action you want your visitors to take on your website is a conversion event. Generating sales of leads are probably our most desirable conversion events, however, there may be other incremental conversion events along the way.

What are your conversion events?
Each and every conversion event on your web site can be measured in terms of a key activity on your website. Most often this will be a specific page view. Does a customer view a conformation page after placing an order or requesting more information? Does your visitor see a thank-you page after signing up for your newsletter?  When you build your website you need to identify the pages on your site that when viewed represent desirable customer behavior. When you can associate a page view with an action you have a way to measure your success.

What kind of tracking tool(s) do you need?
You need to ask yourself how much analyses is necessary, what you are going to do with the data once you collect it and how you will act on it. Do you want to:

• Try to measure all activity on your website?
• Save time managing pay per click advertising campaigns?
• Measure the ROI of your pay per click advertising campaigns?
• Know the paths taken through your site the result in a sale?
• Integrate web analytics and e-mail tracking?
• Be notified when a specific visitor takes a specific action on your site?

You don't have to break the bank
There is no single best web analytics tool for site. Prices and functionality are all over the map. You can spend from $30.00 to $10,000+ per month on web analytics and pay per click advertising management tools. To find your perfect analytics solution, explore one of the following categories.

How to increase your business profitability by hundreds of percent

Websites are ubiquitous these days and everybody is trying to get a better web site ROI. With millions upon millions of sites all trying to appeal to the same traffic, what can you do to improve your web site ROI?

What's In A Name

You can use Google Adwords to very quickly and cost effectively improve your business profitability by a significant amount - hundreds possibly thousands of percent. It all depends on where your site is starting from.

How?

Great question, you get a mere 4 lines of text to play with in Adwords so every single line counts. Even more than that every single letter counts (even the Capitalisation of letters will make a difference to your click through rates, believe it or not).

But what's in a name?

Your name in your ad is of course your URL. When crafting an ad, most people spend a lot of time concentrating on the headline (well worth doing as it is the most important part arguably) and on the ad text (also a good thing but not as important as you'd think).

After the headline, the next thing that prospects' eyes are drawn to is...

Yes you've guessed it - your name - your URL

But what can I do with my URL I hear you say?

Just because you have 1 domain name doesn't mean you need to use it. There is nothing in Google's T&Cs that prohibits you from using a different display URL to that of your destination URL (although you will have to own the display URL and it must resolve to a pertinent page - i.e. If you're advertising pet food, it must be about pet food and not resolve to www.pdqprospects.com for example.

Hundreds of percent more profitable…

We have conducted tests outlined above with some of our clients. Results have ranged from 46% through to 76% more profitable domain names. These results are applicable to your bottom line profitability - remember 76% more traffic will result in a like for like increase in bottom line profits and your results are equally applicable on and offline, whatever grabs attention online will do likewise in offline print media.

We have also seen a 113% improvement on one of our tests (with a small sample) but we stopped the test early because our results were statistically significant and waiting for a larger sample was a moot point - we knew we had a winner.

Pop Quiz

One of my clients Jonathan Stanley has graciously allowed me to show you the results of our tests with him. Consider the following adverts and their display URL's:

• www.talkingleadership.com
• www.thisisleadership.com
• www.leadsuccessfully.com
• www.myleadershipcenter.com
• www.leadingeffectively.com

Which of the above domain names was the winner and which do you think was the loser?

Well, the results are as follows from worst to last:

• MyLeadershipCenter.com 9 clicks
• LeadingEffectively.com 17 clicks
• LeadSuccessfully.com 18 clicks
• ThisIsLeadership.com 21 clicks
• TalkingLeadership.com 37 clicks

Who would have thought it? I certainly wouldn't, but then that's the point. You will never know until you test.

My thanks to Jonathan Stanley once again at www.TalkingLeadership.com for allowing me the use of this example.

And what else can you do with your text?

And even if you want to use your existing domain there's plenty you can still do - remember CAPITALISATION?

And then there is subdomains or even appended directory names.

All it takes is a little creativity and you'll find a much better web site ROI!

If you're looking for better web site ROI, chances are:

* The web is only one part of your business
* You have a specific budget for your web site, and
* You want the site to not only carry its own weight, and
* Why can't it make you some extra Yahoo or Google PPC profits, too?

The corporate situation: budgets need to be closely monitored, and tech people can't get carried away with unnecessary frills.

My experience learning search engine marketing ROI and becoming an SEO expert was more guerilla than corporate. Beginning in 1999, I learned about ranking high on search engines and increased online traffic flying by the seat of my pants. By early 2005, I'd learned how to get tens of thousands of visitors per month, had started my own SEO training course, and had made more than $20,000 two months in a row.

As it turns out, web site design itself doesn't lead to better web site ROI... at least not the graphic kind of web design most people think of.

Ironically, the flashy Flash web sites everyone raves about often prevent you from getting increased online traffic. Search engines analyze sites based on their text- they can’t see Flash yet, and who knows if they ever will. If your text is in graphics without ALT tags or in Flash movies only, you’ll never get high search rankings.

There are loads of web designers out there who want to get paid to make you a beautiful web site, but don't know the first thing about helping you improve your web site ROI. Though independent web design entrepreneurs have to know enough about business to survive themselves, corporate web designers may never have had to learn about running a business or getting good web site ROI.

On the flipside, I spent so long raising myself by my own bootstraps that I've learned how to

* Boost web site traffic for free
* Make free money from Google without AdSense click fraud
* Build my own ecommerce web sites
* Profit from smart PPC bid management

To get better web site ROI, naturally you have to lower your investment and/or increase your profits. Where do the profits that lead to better web site ROI come from?

* Traffic (free or paid)
* Converting Prospects
* Selling new products to previous customers

Here are some review questions for your business:

Are you getting free online traffic by ranking high on search engines? If not, why not?

Is your website search engine optimized? Consider getting search engine placement improvement, taking an SEO training course, or getting affordable small business SEO from an ethical SEO Firm.

Are you adding to and updating your content? Google prefers fresh content, and other search engines may follow suit.

Are your internal linking and navigational structure optimal? Google Guy says internal links from your own site count as much as links from other sites- how many times is each page in your site linked to from other pages in your site?

If you're running multiple pay per click (PPC) campaigns: What is your PPC campaign management plan? How diligent are you with PPC bid management? Are you meeting your break even points for all PPC bids except new ones? Are you dumping the PPC bids that don't work?

If you're selling products or services: Do you have special pages with sales copywriting for each product or service? Is your conversion rate on all sales pages at least 1%? Have you tried to increase your conversion rate to 2% or 3% by tweaking your sales copy and using split tests?

Are you diligent about increase your web site's stickiness? Are you staying in touch with previous customers via an opt-in, third-party managaed ezine? Do you offer ezine subscribers them helpful tips and resources? Do you monitor which articles subscribers read more? Do you use the ezine to upsell? Do you use the ezine to get feedback on products and services?

Are your new products and service changes based on consumer feedback? Do you have any digital products (ebooks, audiobooks, special reports, etc.)? Do you use visitor polls for market intelligence?

Those are just a few questions to help you see which way lies the real road to better web site ROI. If you're interested in my Web consulting services, you can answer those questions on my needs analysis feedback form.

Now here are a few concrete suggestions to improve things on your web site:

1. Get more free traffic
All visitors are candidates for sales conversion and profits. Free traffic is without expense, so that means better web site ROI. Search engine optimize your web site after taking an SEO training class, or get affordable small business SEO.

Ever had a keyphrase review for your business sector done? If not, get one. Optimised keyword marketing can be free, or PPC. It all starts with identifying the right keywords. Targeting the proper keyphrases is one of the three major factors in writing your web site sales copy.

2. Only do profitable pay-per-click advertising
Buying pay per click ads without PPC bid management is throwing your money away. Make sure you have a clear plan in place for every phrase on which you bid. Know what conversion rate you need for each. Send each phrase to specific and different web pages, and monitor your success rate. If you can’t tweak conversion rates high enough to profit on a pay per click phrase, ditch it!

What cuts into your web site ROI more than pay per click advertising at a loss? And don’t think it’s branding. There are much better ways to do branding, and lots of them are free. Branding goals/internet marketing strategy are a whole different ballgame.

3. Convert more prospects
Hopefully you already have a most wanted response (MWR). Perhaps you’ve developed customer profiles and/or modeled customer acquisition and retention phrases. However you group your prospects, make sure you split-test your web copywriting to develop the most powerful sales pages possible.

Your traffic cost for each phrase shouldn’t change much from month to month- either it's free, or you're doing alert PPC bid management, so improving your conversion rates will lead to better web site ROI (as well as allow you to pay higher bids as the phrase becomes more competitive).

4. Encourage Community and Get Feedback
Don’t be afraid to let your customers talk to each other- they'll talk either where you're aware of it, or behind your back. Use forums to help them and find out what they need. Use polls, articles in your e-zine (e newsletter), and free offers to motivate them to answer your specific questions.

The best way to stay in business, sell more, and increase ROI is to know what they need and give it to them. Remember, it’s easier to keep a customer than to get a new one.

Since 1999, San Diego SEO Consultant Brian B. Carter, MS, has reached more than 2 million readers online. His most popular site ranks in the top 1% of all major websites. Brian's second book, "How I Made $78,024.44 in Six Months Using the Newest Secrets of AdSense and Overlooked Keywords" will be available in October, 2005.

I just read the disturbing results of a joint study on the performance of search marketing firms. Jupiter Research and iProspect surveyed 636 qualified search marketers and 224 search agencies, and found that:

- Most internet marketing firms look at metrics like web site traffic or search engine rankings, rather than business results such as ROI (return on investment) or total sales generated from search engine leads.

- Fewer than 40% of search engine marketers are evaluated on ROI or total sales.

- Only 1 out of 7 search marketers measure overall ROI of combined SEO (search engine optimization) and PPC (pay per click) campaigns.

- Most marketers cannot separate the individual ROI of the two different channels - 45% said they cannot determine whether SEO or PPC provides a higher ROI.

Is there a philosophy behind your business’s approach to pay per click (PPC)? The picture painted by my consultant peers is that most companies think you just choose a bunch of keywords, set a monthly budget, and then pay it. Fine-tuning for higher profits hasn’t occurred to them.

For other companies, there may be some thought behind it. Some believe that expansion, higher revenues, and customer acquisition outweigh nearly any cost. But the last 6 years of hard knocks entrepreneurship have drilled some different business basics into my soul.

I believe every advertising campaign should break even or profit on its own merit. This conviction grew while I was investing my own money in my business efforts. Now I work for someone else (feelgoodstore.com) as an internet marketer, and one of our major revenue sources is pay per click. I understand their money isn’t limitless, and I treat it as if it’s my own- I don’t take ad spending lightly.

Thus, my modus operandi is to treat each keyword individually. It either converts for us at a rate and for a price which is sustainable and profitable, or it’s a loser, and I delete it. I generally give a keyword 100 clicks before cutting it loose. That 1% conversion rate is my cut-off point.

With Google Adwords, it’s been easy (Overture has been unable to get us conversion numbers or explain what the problem is, so we’re going to have to write our own code to track it). The conversion rate and cost per conversion are calculated for you, so I compare those numbers to the profit margin on the items that correlate to each keyword. Oh, by the way, Adwords’ “Budget Optimizer”, by their own admission, isn’t recommended if you’re “focused on measuring conversions or values of ad clicks.” Ummm, yeah, give me some of the unvaluable ones that don’t convert, please... duh!

Let me break that down for you... to increase your internet ROI, you must understand the business basics of profit margin, conversion rate, and break-even point. Many articles have been written on these topics, so here’s a summary: For each item, subtract the cost from the price, and you have profit margin. Conversion rate is the percentage of click-throughs who actually buy from you. The break-even point for any item is the profit margin multiplied by the conversion rate.

If you profit $10 on a $30 item, and 5% of your click-throughs convert, then you can’t pay more than $0.50 per click. You see, 5% is 1 out of every 20 people, and if it takes 20 people to make a sale, that’s going to cost you $10 at $0.50 per click, and that’s your break-even point. If you do better than break even, you’re making a profit.

You can do more advanced things if your website coding allows you to query which items and/or total sale amounts associated with particular keywords. For example, I’ve found a certain word that’s in a number of our keyword phrases, and for some reason, buyers who like that word tend to buy more than one item and have a higher total sale. I can use that to calculate my break-even point instead of just the one item.

And when you have months and months of historical data to query, you can find out how often different customer groups return and buy more, and thus what the lifetime value of a customer is. Then you can bid for clicks to get customers, rather than just to sell an item once.

But I’d caution you to go gung-ho basing your maximum bids on lifetime customer value before you have this kind of data. You must be sure that your site fosters multiple lifetime purchases, and know which keywords bring in the repeat customers. Otherwise, you’re shooting a shotgun in the dark… and you might get hit by a ricochet.

Why is it so important to increase your ROI on your PPC bids? It’s not just so that you can increase profits, although that’s one of your goals. It’s also because, ultimately, the most efficient business will be able to bid the highest amount for each keyword and still break even or profit.

And it’s not just about being #1 – there are only so many visible PPC spots. If you’re sloppy about it and waste money, you’ll get pushed out of the visible competition. There are a finite number of valuable, converting keywords for each product, so if you want to sell your product on the internet, you must measure and improve your PPC ROI.

Since 1999, San Diego SEO Consultant Brian B. Carter, MS, has reached more than 2 million readers online. His most popular site ranks in the top 1% of all major websites. Brian's second book, "How I Made $78,024.44 in Six Months Using the Newest Secrets of AdSense and Overlooked Keywords" will be available in October, 2005. For more, see ranking-high-on-search-engines.com