One final step of any marketing program is to measure the program performance and Internet marketing is not an exception.  Key results of Internet marketing are expense saving, customer communication, and site traffic. Therefore, these three outcomes are the metrics used to measure marketing performance.

Expense Saving

If your web site serves as an alternative to customer support who can guide you with information, the end result is saving on support personnel.  It can be accounted for as the number of hour office administrator or customer support can save by dealing with less inquiry on routine business questions.  Therefore, the success of the program relies on how to redirect the traffic of inquiries effectively to your web site. We recommend that you remind customers of the web site address on all marketing materials and when a phone is answered through an answering machine.  However, measurement of expense saving can only be done by an internal investigation and it can be expensive.

Customer Communication

If an objective of a web site is to promote communication between customers and support or marketing personnels, then the end result of a web site is customer’s participation through a web site.  As a result, performance measurement can be a number of email inquiries from your web site or email responses to web site customer survey.  This also can only be measured by internal resource.

Site Traffic

If the main objective of your web site is to advertise your business through the Internet, the metric for success is site traffic. The number of visitors and the number of hits represent site traffic to your web site. In the world of the web, site traffic is interpreted as the scale of the operation, revenue potential, and value of the company.  It is the performance metric that is most objective and accurate.  This can be measured by the party responsible for Internet marketing or web hosting company.