Measuring return on investment (ROI) in a search campaign is a necessity in my opinion. Search marketing is best used as a direct response marketing tool. But it’s often times a slow burn. A marathon, not a sprint. It can take a while to get traffic and see if it’s meeting the business objectives.
The key question to answer before engaging in a search campaign is “What do you want the visitor to do on your site and how much is that worth?” In other words, if there was a gumball machine that spit out a new customer every time you put in money, how much money would you put in to get a customer? Surprisingly, very few businesses can answer this question based on actual historical sales and conversion data.
Metrics to consider for measuring the success of an SEO campaign:
- Overall traffic increase, traffic from search, referral traffic
- Actions taken by the search driven traffic (i.e. not all traffic is good traffic)
- Time on site and pages per visit
- Revenue increase from search traffic
- Annual or lifetime value of a new customer
- Typical cost to acquire a customer
- Increase in the domain’s PageRank
- Increase in site’s backlink portfolio
