Internet Marketing for Small Businesses – What You Must Keep Track of?

Keeping track of your performance is imperative in all types of marketing, because that is what allows you to see the ROI (return on investment), and to figure out exactly what is working for your business and what’s not. Same goes for marketing your business in the cyber world, if you are not keeping track of your progress, you will keep wasting your time, money and resources on strategies which are practically of no use to your business. Tracking, monitoring, and evaluating your marketing regime is the only thing that can keep you on track.

There are different levels and criterion for tracking, but following are the most basic metrics that must be tracked in all types of Internet Marketing campaigns.

Back Links:

In the olden days of Search Engine Optimization, we use to deal with back links in bulk i.e. the more links you had, the better. Keeping track of these links was limited to having a look at the number of links your website has. A list of free directories was considered to be an asset; people paid hundreds of dollars to get a link from some of those high page rank web directories.

Fast forward to the present days, and you can see that things have drastically changed. Good news is, you don’t need to build links in bulk, bad news is, you still need to build links more than before, however you need to be extra vigilant and make sure you are not over optimizing. The links need to be relevant, coming from trustworthy websites, and they should be growing in numbers that looks natural, or else you will get a penalty instead of going up the ranks. Tracking your back links or link prospects will let you steer clear of the practices that might result in a Google Penalty, and do more harm than good.

Rankings:

It’s quite difficult to know your exact rankings, in fact there’s no universal ranking anymore, owing to highly personalized search results. Your ranking for a given keyword can vary from one location to another (in fact from one PC to another). However, you still need to keep track of your rankings to have an idea if your SEO efforts are paying off or not. It will also allow you to experiment with different SEO and link building methods to gauge the ROI.

Unique Visitors & Bounce Rate:

Everything you do, in the name of Search Engine Optimization, is meant for attracting unique visitors and eventually some sales for your website, so it’s a given that you must to keep track of your bounce rate and the number of unique visitors to see if you are on the right track. Having a high bounce rate means that you were so close (yet so far) of making a sale, while knowing everything about your visitors will let you determine the possible reasons for a high bounce rate. Not keeping a track of these statistics is like shooting in the dark.

Social Media:

Keeping track of your presence at social media is important; because social media is the next big thing after search engine (some might say it’s bigger than that). Social media works differently for different types of websites and businesses, so you cannot rely on stats or tips posted by other webmasters or bloggers. For success at social media, you need to be more creative than systematic, you need to experiment a lot while trying new ways to go viral on some of those social media websites. Without having any kind of tracking (e.g. the referrals from social networks), you will never know if your efforts are paying off.