One of the largest expenses in an average successful business, is marketing.
Without marketing many businesses will not grow, succeed or even survive.
In the average business the percentage of gross revenue spent on marketing could be around 10%
The most important factor in advertising your business, product or service is measuring the results of your marketing efforts.
There are two main types of marketing: Direct and Indirect.
An online example of direct marketing is displaying a search engine advert next to someone searching for your type of goods or services. An offline example of direct marketing would be to exhibit at a trade fair or an expo related to your goods or services.
An online example of indirect marketing would be to display a banner advert on a random website not related to your goods or services. An offline example of indirect marketing is placing a billboard on the side of the road.
Whatever marketing and advertising you do, you need to know (measure) the response from the marketing in order for you to improve your advertising campaigns (both in terms of quality as well as type, target and budget)
Measuring your reactions and responses on your website: Analytics is the discovery, interpretation, and communication of meaningful patterns in data; and the process of applying those patterns towards effective decision making.
You can install analytics tools on your CMS (Content management System) or you can use external analytics. When you use free analytics software you are the product as your data is collected, analised and used to generate revenue for the provider of the “free” service. There is no such thing as a “free service” as there is always a cost involved.
Whichever data collection system you decide to use, even the basic systems will supply you with the amount of visitors, what they did, which pages they visited and how long they were on each page.
a very basic and simplified Practical example of how you could use analytics is as follows:
- You start a new campaign and call it “My Name”
- You allocate a budget (R100) and a start date as well as an end date for your new campaign
- You decide on a strategy for the campaign, in this example: Advertise a web page on Facebook with a catchy banner
- You create a brand new page for your campaign and call it : https://advertises/my-new-campaign
- You install or enable analytics on the page
- You pay for your advert in this case: Facebook (R100) for indirect advertising (on amount of impressions and not per click)
- You book your advertising to start on the start date and end on the end date.
- You analyse the traffic to the page, (also check the source – that it was from Facebook), how many visitors did you receive and how many of those visitors responded to your offer