Another good way to measure success -- stop it

That's right, stop what you're doing. In down times we're always under pressure to cut budgets, but that is in fact a great way to measure the effectiveness of your tactics. For example, a year ago, we were spending over $1200 a month on Google adwords but had no idea whether it was really helping us bring in qualified leads. Sure, we could tell it was driving traffic, but was there any real ROI in it?

Yes, there are lots of variables, like the key words, style and content of the specific ads, that can influence effectiveness. But across the board we saw no drop in traffic whatsoever, and, more importantly, no reduction in leads. In fact, by  blogging and tweeting more often, we've doubled traffic across all of our sites and according to Leadlander  the leads we are getting are actually more qualify.

Now obviously if I had to pay someone to spend an hour or so a day blogging or tweeting the ROI calculation would be different, and obviously my time isn't exactly "free," but as a way to test the effectiveness of one of our marketing efforts, it's pretty clear that the ROI isn't there.

Comments

[Anne-Marie Faiola]

We had the same exact results as you did. Granted, it's anecdotal but our Google AdWords drove less traffic to our site than excellent engagement with the customer through various social media mediums.

We are retooling Google Adwords with landing pages and the like to see if perhaps, we were measuring the wrong thing. I'll keep you posted on how that experiment goes if you're interested. =)

[Engago Team]

Happy with LeadLander - then get esctatic with LEADS Explorer.

[Robin Anderson]

Katie, This is a great blog post proving the effectiveness of utilizing social media tools. I am now seeing the results with my site as the traffic has increased dramatically.