ROI (Return-On-Investment) holds an implicit importance in business and in internet marketing and for this reason we are going to discuss what makes it a crucial part of your web presence.

First, some reasons why measuring ROI online has eluded most business owners:

• It can be difficult to assign value to website traffic
  • The value of your traffic can be difficult or impossible to measure without having some type of conversion tracking in place on your website.  See definition for conversion below (1).
  • There are different types of users who visit your site:  those who are interested in buying your products/services, and those who are interested in research only.
• Implementing conversion tracking requires technical expertise
  • Because of the technical nature of the web, implementing conversion tracking on your website requires someone with familiarity in the way websites are structured and several common coding languages. 
  • This person, generally referred to as a web developer should have experience in either analytics or multivariate testing software -- Almost all industry-leading website analytics suites come with some type of conversion tracking feature but not all are created equal!
• It can be difficult to make sense of analytic data
  • As many things on the internet are not tangible or concrete, we are fortunate to have access to third-party web applications that provide very reliable, actionable data about our web presence.
  • While this data is extremely valuable it comes at a cost: the time required to learn a robust web application and the ever-changing array of technology acronyms.

Now, the reasons why (despite the above challenges) every business owner should absolutely measure ROI for their web presence:

• Making sound business decisions is crucial for the longevity of any business.
  • Knowing your ROI is a necessary prerequisite to determining the success of any investment.  In this case the investment is one or all of the following: a website, ongoing internet marketing campaign or search engine optimization campaign.
  • Knowing your ROI will help you answer the following questions
  • Should I invest more?
  • Should I invest less?
  • Am I breaking even?  …And if so, did I calculate my own time spent on managing my web projects?
  • Do I need to reevaluate my strategy?
• For a business to move forward in the most effective way, some measure of success is needed.  In other words, it’s extremely difficult to know where we are going if we don’t know where we are right now!

The above mentioned thoughts apply to many aspects of business, but being business owners who are increasingly bound to technology (and more specifically the internet), it’s important that we learn to measure ROI for each of our online endeavors.  At our disposal, we have an effective, highly measurable form of marketing that, to many, lacks clarity.  With a variety of tools available to help us measure the ROI, we can bring our business goals back into focus and ensure that our websites and online marketing efforts are forwarding them.

1) Conversion: A clearly defined, measurable activity that takes place on your website. A conversion could be: a user clicking a button viewing a particular piece of content, calling a custom 800 number, submitting a contact form, etc.