What does success look like?

One of the questions we like to ask our clients when we start working with them on an engagement is “how are we measuring the success of this?” And often clients aren’t sure how to measure the success of their online marketing efforts. So we help them establish some Key Performance Indicators — important things to measure that drive the health and success of the business overall — and put in place analytics systems to measure those things.

Recently we evolved that practice to include creating something we call an Online Marketing Dashboard. It’s a simple spreadsheet that we use to capture a birds-eye view of important online success measures on a month-to-month basis.

So what does an Online Marketing Dashboard look like. Well, for us — Fruition uses one, of course — we identified 4 key things that online marketing does to build our bottom line as a company:

• Creating awareness of our company
• Engaging potential customers with our ideas and perspectives
• Spreading the influence of our ideas
• Generating leads

And for each of those general categories, we  identified some measures that would indicate the extent to which we were being successful at doing each of those things. For us, our main online marketing vehicles are our Web site, our blog, Twitter and LinkedIn and our metrics reflect that.

So, for instance, to measure the growing (we hope) awareness of our business, we track our Web and blog unique visitors and total visits, our Twitter + LinkedIn followers and our Google PageRank. To measure our success at creating engagement with our community, we track comments on our Blog and on our LinkedIn posts, Twitter ReTweets and mentions, average time spent by  visitors to our site and blog as well as  the number of page views per visit on our site and blog.

It goes on like that, but I think you get the idea.

To be truly effective, your Online Marketing Dashboard needs to be tailored to your business goals as well as to your specific online marketing activities.

How about you? Are you measuring your online marketing success? How are you tracking your success? I’d love to hear your tips and insights, too.