Local Sacramento online marketing companies, such as Champion Online Marketing, may use several tools to measure the success of every campaign they launch for their clients. These metrics reveal mostly solid numbers and real stats that indicate the effectiveness of a specific marketing tactic. As Forbes’ Jayson DeMers notes:

Measurement is what makes marketing a science, rather than a superstition. For many business owners, marketing is a superfluous expense—something to spend money on only when the budget is flexible enough to accommodate it. This is because the return on investment on marketing is, in many cases, unpredictable.

Here are some of the most critical metrics to measure online marketing success:

Traffic – Knowing the percentage of visitor traffic to your website, and the specific channel through which these visitors come through, gauges how well your strategy is driving traffic to your site. Ideally measured month after month, this metric also calculates the percentage of visitors to your site whether by direct or organic means, or through referrals or social media. Leads are also gathered from those who fill out forms and enter contact information. It is critical to know how many of those visitors became leads, as well as the specific type of content that would lead them to convert.

Bounce rate – This points out to the number of people that land on a specific page on a website, but leave without visiting any other page. This can be checked by pulling up the “content” or “pages” report and looking at the bounce rate column, showing different values that correspond to a specific user at any given time.

Overall conversion rate – Conversion rates point out to the percentage of visitors to a site who perform a specific action, like requesting a white paper. Levels of 2 to 3 percent conversion are considered average. Identifying the specific landing page which converts visitors to customers is important as it helps business owners recognize the strategies that are working for them and those that are not.

Errors – People these days are discriminating with what they want and need, and company websites aren’t immune to these. Tracking errors enables website owners to know when the numbers drop. Getting a monthly or weekly report of “404” errors (aka page not found) is one thing; the host of online marketing metrics provided by Google Analytics is another, and are quite useful.

Successful internet marketing for Sacramento businesses start and end with measuring results against the various metrics set up to quantify and calculate the effectiveness of a company’s marketing strategies. Without these metrics, and the absence of concrete statistics, a business will be subject to the winds of unpredictability, without ever having the means to quantify the success or failure of their marketing efforts.

(Source: 10 Online Marketing Metrics you need to be Measuring, Forbes, August 15, 2014)