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The phrase “ROI” is bounced around a lot in the search marketing industry.  ROI is short for “return on investment.”  Your return on your search marketing investment can easily be tracked and managed by using free and low cost web tools.  As a matter of fact, when you see that an ad or certain keywords aren’t performing, you can switch gears in the middle of a campaign by pulling the ad or adjusting its language.

Consider this. What if you spent tons of money on a banner ad, but didn’t measure it.  You might know that your web traffic went up significantly, but what if your sales didn’t increase?  Web analytics tools allow you to keep track of each and every click made by people who visit your website.  You can determine if they got to your website and immediately clicked away or if they spent time there, learning about your products, only leaving once they got to your price page.

So, how do you track your ROI?  There’s an endless amount of ROI tracking software out there.  As a matter for fact, if you use customer relationship management software, it may have some general ROI tracking built into it.  However, for a simple, yet effective ROI tracking software, consider Google Analytics.  On a basic level it allows you to track your leads and conversions.  On a more sophisticated level it allows you to test different landing pages and also to test the keywords in your pay-per-click advertising campaign.  You can even create your own customized reports.

Another way to measure your ROI is with the use of proxy phone numbers.  This is a phone number you set up that forwards to your regular phone line.  Customers who see an online ad, but then convert offline by calling your company, can now be tracked and targeted.  Companies like Mongoose Metrics have solutions for creating multiple proxy numbers to track different aspects of a marketing campaign.  Mongoose has integrated their products with Google Analytics so you can analyze all of your marketing campaigns with one tool.

The bottom line is that not measuring your ROI is like advertising in the dark.  Real time ROI tracking allows you to find out how well your campaign is performing at any time of the day or night.

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