For marketing professionals, measuring return on investment (ROI) is very important. With the right web partner providing effective tools and analysis, measuring ROI with web-based marketing efforts is easy compared to traditional channels where audience interaction is much more obscure.

The first step toward measuring results is setting goals. According to search marketing expert Carrie Hill, “The most successful online marketing campaigns use an idea and a goal and leverage that idea and goal as much as they can before it’s exhausted.”

Effective goals need to be SMART Goals – Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-Bound. Solid examples of SMART web goals include: “Increase traffic by 60% in six months” or “Add 1500 new subscribers to the newsletter over the next year” or “Connect with 10 people per week on Facebook.”

Defining web goals is a job best completed before designing a website or other web based marketing tool. Setting goals as an after thought can lead to extended development time, additional incurred cost, and poor performance. Also by proactively establishing goals, web designers can tailor the site structure in a way that will best help achieve the goals set forth.

Planning how to reach these goals is surprisingly simple by breaking the down the goal into more easy-to-understand steps. Let’s use XYZ company who sells printing press machinery as an example.

Establish a SMART goal
- Increase web-based revenue by 20% ($2 million) in 12 months

Knowing the average annual customer purchase amount, determine how many customers are needed to make up the increase in revenue.
-$50,000 average annual purchase x Y customers = $2 million
-40 customers are needed

Using historical business data, the average rate of converting a perspective into a client can be determined. Let’s say the conversation rate is 10%.
-10% conversion rate x Y number of perspective customers = 40 customers
-400 perspective customers are needed

Knowing on average that 2% of website visitors will convert into perspective customers, determine the number of web visitors needed.
-2% x Y number of web visitors = 400 perspective customers (annually)
-20,000 additional web visitors needed annually or 1,667 web visitors per month

You can also use our online goal calculator to figure out how many visitors and leads you need in order to achieve your web goals.