How long does it take to evaluate the impact of a single marketing action?

By using google analytics you should get most of the info you need.

You should see results from a social media post almost immediately

publishing content will take a bit longer as it has to get indexed and will take a bit of time to climb in the SERPS

As for backlinks if you are looking for the SEO results it is hard to say how long but if looking for the traffic generated then it should be within a day or 2 depending on the site the backlink is coming from. Again, check your google analytics or whatever tracking software you use

When you publish on social media and want to know how much traffic comes from those posts, you can add Google UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) parameters to the links you share, and then you can attribute traffic to each posts in Google Analytics.

Well if its related to social media etc you can evaluate faster but when it comes to seo then dont put to much hope as seo its strange and complicated as you need to wait a lot to rank ,etc

What are you trying to accomplish?

Value is a subjective.

Are you trying to figure how to spend your time? Then you need to know what an activity result is with to you, then take into account how well you execute, how fast.

Getting a back link from forums is easy, fast compared to getting one from the main page of a business website. And produced significantly less valuable results. Well, if you are me.

Do, what are you after?

To the OP: Please hover over your user name in the black toolbar at the top and click on "View Classic". Then you'll be able to use the quote function and people will know which post you're responding to.

Thanks.

Sounds like it would be some trial and error here.

For example if you published some new content on your site, you should do the necessary SEO for it, and check back everyday to gauge the results for rankings. Then everyday do something new to see if it will boost the ranking for a low competition keyword.

After 1 week of doing something new and relevant everyday (ex. adding relevant backlinks, creating related articles, youtube videos, rss feed and blog directory submissions, etc), you should measure your results in the search engines. Make sure you document everything that you did to push the rankings up for the content, and do the same things for each new content that you publish.

Then whenever you create new content, you will have a step-by-step blueprint of what to do to push a new article to the top of the search engines for a low competition keyword.

So to answer your question... give it 1 week, and during that 1 week, keep doing things that would help boost the rankings, then create a task list for yourself to do for every new content you produce.

24 hours for sure!!

72 hours till the fat lady sings.

Time is probably not the right measure here. You have the right idea in isolating single variables, just like in a high school science experiment--change ONE thing and see what happens. However, what will tell you about effetiveness isn't time but rather what happens over a certain number of views.

Now this has something to do with your traffic source. What I mean is its quality level, or level of match of message to market. So you have to make sure that's consistent. Don't be mixing visitors to a landing page from Facebook, your website and this forum, for example: that will muddy the waters and make it tough for you to know the results of anything.

One traffic source ===> one conversion tool. One change.

The sample size, or 'n' number, is pretty large. Larger than you're thinking. Unless you get 500+ views in 24 hours it's unlikely you'll learn anything in that period.

I would be looking for a minimum of 200 views to tell you something, and that's still a low, arbitrary number. True split testing requires a sample size far bigger than most people think.

You can see how many views in a day your conversion tool typicaly gets, and divide 200 by that. Or 500 if you want. That'll give you an idea of how many days you need to leave it alone to learn something.

What Jason said, plus:
What's the final outcome from an action?
For me, it would be a sale.


So, for me, no matter what I do, I end up at sales.


You'd benefit it you broke things down.


Let's say you're writing an article.


There's a long way between the writing and when enough people find it to get you a sale... And hard to connect one article to a particular sale.


But you want to keep that in mind.


I say that because I've come across many who said they were doing fine with their online endeavors because they got so many likes and so many views.


If your final goal is views, then it's ok. Their final goal was to make $10k (or at least as much as they had made at their last job), so views, impressions, likes, shares are pointless without a sale.


If you track everything, long enough, you'll have a pretty good idea what value a step has.


Many people on this forum (and other parts of the world) focus too much on content creation.


They write and post dozens of 2000-word articles, then complain they're making no sales.


Your first step is to create/access/identify a property people will be paying you to get/buy through your link.


Then, you have to take it to the market (create an account on Etsy or Ebay or a website all of your own... selling on platforms that already attract buyers looking to buy what you're selling is better, in my opinion, then creating your own site only).


Then, you need to drive qualified traffic to wherever you placed your offer.


Once you have one property that gets you money, you might want to create/acquire/identify another one.


The game is find something people want to pay for and put it where they can find it, with a gimme money button.


Creating tons of content, again, is not it, it's just one of the parts.


With all that said,
if you have enough info already, you can go backwards.


Still, it's hard to compare getting one backlink to tweaking the landing page...


Though, if you're getting enough traffic, a little tweak can increase sales, long term, by a lot.


At some point, assuming you doing it right, one backlink will take you from #3 to #1 and you're traffic for one or more keywords goes up by 300%. How much is that link worth getting?


Tweaking onpage can make you jump a lot, sometimes.


My point, some activities have, when you count one repetition, not much value, but at a given point, collectively, they have value out of proportion with the number of the total of each one added up.



And, then, there's the 'what you like doing' pitfall. You'll find yourself tempted to overrate things you like doing.