The Internet is both a blessing and a curse to marketers. While having a website allows you to promote your company to potentially millions of prospects, most website visitors remain anonymous. They visit your site, MAYBE find the information they're looking for and then leave.

Until now the best strategy available to you for evaluating your online efforts was analyzing your log files, using tracking URLs, and providing custom landing pages, so you could get some idea of the ways visitors got to your site. Beyond that point, determining which visitors become prospects or customers was much more difficult.

As a Netbex client you will have access to an innovative new service called Insite Metrics that:

• Individually tracks the path of each visitor who arrives on your site from a search engine, PPC clickthrough, or other source you specify.
• Determines the effectiveness of specific search engines and keywords by identifying the specific engines and terms that lead the visitor to register on your site or purchase a product from you.
• Calculates the ROI of pay per click campaigns by showing the amount of sales attributable to each one.
• Identifies the directories and links to your site that bring in the most leads.
• Shows which recipients of your email marketing messages visited your site, and what they did when they got there.

Tracking the Results of Your Online Marketing

It has always been important for you to track the results of your marketing efforts. With direct mail you keep track of how many pieces you mailed, who you mailed them to, how many responded, what they ordered, and how profitable the whole effort was. While the Internet, in theory, has always held out the promise of being the most "trackable" marketing medium available, in practice it hasn't been so.

While your website logs have always allowed you to track how many visitors have responded to a particular campaign, they can't tell you which of these visitors took action on your site, like downloading a document or filling out a contact form. With Insite Metrics you can monitor the activity of each visitor to your site to determine the effectiveness of each marketing campaign.

By tracking the activities of your prospects on your website, you can identify those most likely to purchase your products. Insite Metrics lets you see which pages your prospects visited on your site. For example, you can send an email to a prospect with a link to your site for more information. We will track whether the prospect visited your site, and which pages the prospect viewed. This leads to more profitable marketing because you'll know, almost instantly, which products or services your prospects find most attractive.

Determining the Effectiveness of Your Website Design

You can also analyze the effectiveness of your website's navigation system and design. You might find that most of your visitors are landing on your home page and never viewing another page. This tells you that there's a fundamental problem with the design of your home page. You can then test changes to your home page design and track what visitors do after each design change. Eventually you'll hit on a winning design.

Another likely scenario: You send out an email that drives prospects to a web page containing a special offer. You see that the majority of the prospects visiting the special offer page aren't clicking through to your shopping cart, but instead are going to your "Sign Up for Our Free Newsletter" page. So the next time you send out a special offer you know to remove the "Free Newsletter" link from your special offer page.

Call Jon Lowder at 703.494.4196 x 135 or email him at jon@netbex.com for more information on how you can take advantage of this powerful online sales tool.