Online marketing evaluation

How can you see if all your social marketing is working? One way is through buzz monitoring i.e. trying to track how and where people are talking about your campaign. A simple tool that you can use for free is Google Alerts. You can set this up through going to the main google website and specifying which key words you want it to alert you about when they are used on a website. Google Alerts then emails you when these keywords are mentioned in online media & blogs. One tip to bear in mind though is that you may want to make sure these keywords are very specific otherwise you will get a lot of email from Google Alerts that won't allow you to track your particular campaign or issue. You can track blog mentions via Technorati & tools like Blogpulse and there are now some great tools for Twitter.

The mantra of online marketing is 'measure everything'. Whereas real world impact can be very tricky to measure, the nature of the internet makes it easy to track and count things, whether it's the number of visitors to your website or the % of your email list who take an action. You can use this to help your reporting and accountability to funders or whoever. But the main use of metrics should be an ongoing evaluation of your tactics. Is your homepage feature encouraging people to sign-up to your newsletter? Who are the main referrers to your website and what are the most popular search terms? Is your email subject line increasing the number of people who open them? For your site, the main tool will probably be Google Analytics, a free tool which provides a lot of detail on your web site statistics (you may need some help installing this). For email marketing, whichever email tool you choose. And for the social networks you'll largely be relying on the sites you can get from them, such as number of friends, number of comments, and number of video views. Make sure you plan for and spend time to regularly review these statistics they will tell you a lot about who is using your site, where they are coming from to reach your site and what they are looking at. These facts will not only help you understand who you are reaching right now, but should also help you plan for the future. The web promises what traditional PR & marketing never could - the possibility of measuring engagement.