How Do You Measure Success in Internet Marketing

There are many things we track in the course of our businesses that are equal to doorways in the processes that we use to grow our businesses.

We count these doorways as business metrics:

• Ad views;
• Ad click-through's;
• Sales page views;
• Time on page;
• Traffic;
• Opt-in Rates;
• Number of times articles published;
• Eye-balls;
• Links;
• Links sending traffic;
• Google Rankings;
• Unique Visitors;
• Page Views;
• Return Visitors;
• Sales Conversions;
• Refund Rates;
• Profits;
• Etc.

Most of us track these individual metrics to discover where we can make minor changes to improve our conversions at each step of the process...

We understand that if we can improve a single step in the process, we can improve the results of each following step in the process, thereby improving the whole process.

To be honest, the reason I am making this post today is that I am sometimes surprised to see how many people measure their success on a single metric or a few.

Google chasers are the people who most commonly fall into this trap.

They count links in numbers rather than quality plus numbers.

They count page one listings for a target keyword.

They count sales.

Of course, in the end, counting sales/profits are the end game that all of us should focus.

But often times, people are blind to the other metrics that will support the end result, and therefore unable to generate the end result that really matters to a real business -- sales and profits.



For example, how many people do you see here in the forum who see page one in Google as the only thing necessary to get sales?

They are blind to a page title and description that will create the desire to visit their website, for the person using Google. They are blind to having good sales copy and an easy-to-use shopping cart. They are blind to pricing and value concerns.

They see themselves on page one of Google, and they start uttering words such as "scam" and "lie" when page one of Google does not automatically lead to more sales.


For example, how many people do you see in the forum who are so busy counting links to impress Google, that they forget to consider Click-Through Rates (CTRs) on those links they made?

They only see links as a method to impress Google and get those famous page one rankings in Google. Yet they don't seem to realize that real people might find those links and click them.


It is as if many people think that the metrics are more important than the end results.

When impressing Google is more important than measurable profits from a wide variety of traffic, I just have to beat my head against a wall, wondering why common sense seems so uncommon...