The disadvantage of traditional marketing is that you cannot measure the results correctly. You do not know precisely how a TV commercial or newspaper advertisement contributed to the final turnover. That makes it difficult to calculate the ROI and adjust your marketing strategy to achieve even better results. You can mainly follow your gut feeling and copy what your competitors are doing.


Fortunately, this is not the case with online marketing because of all (technological) possibilities online. You can measure almost everything online and see the accurate results of your online marketing efforts. However, there are still many companies that carry out all kinds of online marketing activities but do not measure the results. The reasons for this can be summarized in 2 points:


  1. Sometimes it is not clear what should and can be measured. For example, with a webshop that advertises with AdWords, it is logical that you at least calculate the sales in the webshop. However, if you do not sell something directly through your website, you may be wondering how and what to measure.
  2. Measuring all kinds of things online requires some technical skills and knowledge. Do terms such as conversion codes, Facebook pixels, segments, and target URLs mean anything to you? If an entrepreneur or SME does all the online marketing themselves, they may lack the knowledge (or time) needed to measure conversion.

To help you understand which metrics are important and which ones you should be tracking, we have put together a list of the conversions you can measure and improve your online marketing results accordingly.


Number of Sales

The most obvious conversion to measure is the number of sales. If you sell your products or services online, you can easily measure whether a specific sale is a result of, for example, your Google Ads campaign, Facebook advertisement, or newsletter. By analyzing this data, you can adjust your marketing activities that your online sales will grow. For example, see which channel has the highest conversion rate and spend more budget on this channel. Or stop certain marketing activities that are not generating online sales. Or test with different communication messages to measure the effect on the conversion rate.


Number of Calls

If your product or service is a lot more complex, you probably will not close your sales online but in person. This is reflected in, for example, B2B companies or branches such as lawyers, insurance, etc. You probably get a lot of calls, but of course, you do not ask each time how the person on the phone ended up with you. Fortunately, it is possible to set up phone calls as conversions. You can then measure through which channel the potential customer came to your telephone data and clicked on the call button. This way you can ultimately trace back which marketing activities are responsible for the most calls to your company.


Newsletter Subscriptions

You may want to increase the number of newsletter subscriptions with your online marketing activities. For example, you want to increase your reach, deploy an extensive mail marketing campaign, sell more products to existing customers or you have a social message to announce. Here too you can easily measure how many registrations come through which channel. To increase the number of registrations, you bet more on the most successful marketing channel or test with different marketing messages.


E-book

You see that more and more companies offer, for example, a free e-book, information brochure, or test version for download. In their marketing activities they do not focus on direct sales, but on collecting leads. The person who wants to download the offered product leaves his data. Then, they try to convert these leads into customers via email marketing. The free download of the offered product is set as a conversion. It is important to measure how many of these leads become customers (quality of these leads).


Registration for Events or Workshops

If you organize events, workshops, or, for example, training sessions, you can set registration for this as a conversion. It is important to ensure that it is very easy for the customer to register online. This way you can accurately measure how registrations are going and which marketing activities are responsible for the most registrations.


Appointments

More and more companies are responding to the need of consumers to easily make appointments online. This is much faster than sending a separate e-mail or having to call. The consumer will therefore be more inclined to make that appointment. By properly setting up this process on your website, you can also measure this accurately. For example, are appointments only made via your Facebook page or people who came directly to your site? This way you know what to focus on if you want to grow with your company.


As you can see in the list above, you can also measure conversions if you don't have a webshop or sell directly online. Depending on your product or service and the purpose of your marketing activities, there are various options for measuring conversions. Do you want to grow with your company? Then measuring the results of your marketing activities, analyzing them, and, finally, adjusting your marketing activities is essential. You will be amazed at the results you can achieve with this!