ROI Tracking 101 With TrackPoint

TrackPoint is an online marketing return on investment (ROI) tracking solution. As with any good ROI tracking solution, its job is to show you those areas of your online marketing that are working and which ones aren’t.

Let’s say you spend a few hundred dollars each month on Pay-Per-Click campaigns and banner ad campaigns. In addition you send out a monthly newsletter, get some website traffic from search engines, and also receive a bit of traffic from other websites linking to you.

TrackPoint’s primary purpose is to let you know which of your ads are bringing in traffic and resulting in sales or leads. These are commonly referred to as “conversions”.

TrackPoint breaks down your online marketing activities into 4 different categories. They are:

1. Campaigns
2. Pay Per Click (PPC)
3. Search Results
4. Referrers

Any online marketing activity can be put into one of these categories and tracked, so that every cent, visit and conversion is accounted for and can be optimized to help you make the most out of your advertising revenue and website traffic. A conversion is the final result that you desire from a visitor to your web site. It’s really the main reason that you created your web site.

For example, if you sell something online, then a conversion would be a sale and each conversion would have an aggregate dollar value associated with it. If you’re trying to add subscribers to your newsletter, then a subscription to your newsletter would count as the conversion. In this case, it would not have a dollar value associated with it.

If you’re using your website to generate leads, then your conversion may result whenever someone uses your contact form to request more information from you. TrackPoint lets you track any type of conversion that you can think of.
If you’ve ever advertised using banner ad’s on a website or sent a newsletter with links for more information then these would be classified as “Campaigns”. Campaigns generally have a fixed or monthly cost.

Being able to see which of your banner ad campaigns, links in your newsletters, text links, etc. are bringing you more traffic and sales is extremely important and effective in regards to online marketing.

If you’re running two ads on two different sites with both ads costing the same and one is generating more sales than it costs, but the other is costing you more than it’s generating then you can simply drop the one that’s not doing as well and purchase more ads from the site that is.

Using this simple strategy you can gaurantee that every dollar you spend marketing your website is will return more than one dollar back.

Take the following example:

In this example, it’s extremely easy to see that our “Newsletter Promo Link” performs significantly better than the banner ad campaign running on “DemoWebsite”.

The newsletter link makes more money than it costs, so we know instantly that this ad is effective and that we should plan more ads around it. We can also see that the banner ads are costing us more than they are making, so a wise decision would be to drop them or re-work them so that they are more successful.
Pay-Per-Click — as the term implies — means that you only pay when someone clicks on your ad. The most common PPC ads can be found whenever you run a search on Google.

If you look at the right side of the search results page, you’ll see small advertisements related to your search query. These advertisements are placed there by advertisers through Goggle’s Adwords system and whenever someone clicks on one of these ads the advertiser is charged a small amount. This amount can vary from a few cents to a few dollars, depending on the popularity of the search keywords.

Take a look at our example above. Our first ad does extremely well, but our second ad actually loses money.

By tracking and analyzing your PPC traffic, you’re able to spend less on the ads that aren’t generating money and spend more on the ad’s and keywords that are.
Search results — also commonly referred to as organic or natural search results — are a type of marketing which you don’t need to pay for. These occur whenever someone performs a search on a search engine such as Google or Yahoo and your website appears in the results.

Whenever a user clicks on this result and is taken to your website, TrackPoint tracks exactly what the user searched for and which page of your web site they landed on.

By being able to see which search results and search engines are generating traffic, sales and/or leads, you’ll be able to better optimize your site to improve your search engine results for those keywords. You will also be able to use those keywords when setting up your PPC ads.

For example, if you’re running an online flower shop and you’re receiving a lot of traffic for the keywords “Dozen roses sydney” then it would make sense to feature your “Dozen roses” package more prominently on your site, thus increasing your chance of conversion because you now know exactly what the majority of your visitors are looking for.

As well as letting you know which sets of keywords are performing the best, you can use TrackPoint to find out which search engine is generating the most leads. Here’s an example:

Notice that Google and Yahoo bring in roughly the same amount of traffic, but Google visitors seem to purchase a lot more than those from Yahoo. My experience tells me this is because Google visitors are generally more tech savvy than Yahoo users and my product requires a more tech savvy individual to use it.

This data shows me that if I were to hire a search engine optimization expert, I’d want them focussing on the Google search engine rather than the Yahoo one. It also tells me that I should spend my PPC dollars on the Google search engine instead of the Yahoo one because ultimately that’s going to bring in more conversions, which means a better bottom line for me.
A referrer is a website that links to your site. Whenever someone clicks from a link on another site to your web site, that click is tracked as a referal visit. The difference between a referal and a campaign or PPC is that you don’t pay for a referal. These are links that point to your web site that you have not paid for and don’t constitute as paid advertising.

By tracking referals and where your traffic is coming from, you can easily see which other web sites are bringing you good traffic and more importantly, which of these websites is generating revenue for your site.

For example, let’s say that you find a web site linking to you that you had no idea was generating so much traffic and sales for you. The link on that particular website was tiny, hidden at the bottom of the web site.

Using this information, you contact the owner of the site and purchase some paid advertising in a more prominent spot on his site. This spot brings in more traffic and hence more revenue. This is a technique that you can repeat over and over with every high traffic referrer that you can find.

In the example above I can see that www.otherwebsite.com is bringing me some great traffic and revenue. I can use that information to potentially purchase better links or create more prominent partner opportunities on that web site.
Sales and ROI tracking can sometimes be difficult to master, but using a tool like TrackPoint can help you not only monitor your online marketing activities, but also increase your revenue and traffic as well.