Every online advertiser knows that search engine marketing is a contributor for generating sales, but how do you know if your online campaign is actually producing a return on investment?

Calculating your return on investment (ROI), or rate of return, is not only easy to do, but it can also help you determine how your overall campaign is performing.  ROI can be calculated by using this formula:

ROI = (Revenue - Investment) ÷ Investment × 100

For example, if you generated $3000 in revenue and spent $150 in online advertising, your ROI would be 1,900%.

While attracting searchers to your site is important for branding your business, products and services; generating revenue is really the main objective.  That being said, it is not suggested to completely cease all branding campaigns, as these visitors may convert to customers at a later date.  Try testing different strategies such as, lowering campaigns budgets or excluding geographic areas that generate a large amount of visitors, but do not necessarily result in sales.

I have utilized these suggestions for several clients and as a result, have seen dramatic improvements in not only in the average order value and amount of sales, but more importantly the ROI.  While there is no exact formula for making a campaign perform; testing one strategy is not recommended.  You do not want to automatically deem your campaign a failure if you’re not seeing a positive ROI within the first days or weeks of beginning a new campaign. It can take time to determine which technique works best for your campaign; so keep testing and experimenting.

With the arrival of the New Year, 2010 is the perfect time to evaluate your online campaigns and budgets.  It should come as no surprise that advertisers are allocating more of their budgets to support pay per click efforts.  According to eMarketer.com, it is projected that online advertisers will spend $11.4 billion in advertising for 2010; an increase of over $600 million from 2009.

When assessing your budget, try allocating more of your budget toward campaigns that indicate special savings.  By incorporating these promotions into your ad copy, not only can you make your brand loyal customers aware of these deals, but you may also acquire new customers. Simply offering a promotion on your site alone may not produce the exposure you are looking for.

Another way to maximize your budget is to analyze your ecommerce and conversion results per state.  Specific states that perform better than others should have their campaign duplicated and geo-targeted to concentrate on a certain area.  By breaking these campaigns out into area specific budgets, it allows you the opportunity to garner more sales within this designated area or areas.

With so many different opportunities to generate sales online sales, now is the time to increase your budget to support new, fun and creative promotions.  Having the budget to support new campaign initiatives can help make 2010 a great year for your online business.

With all of the advancement in search engine marketing, it is imperative for online retailers to maintain proper data in their inventory control system.  Depending on the e-commerce platform that you use, there could be ten to fifty attribute fields in your inventory system.  While you may think for the sake of speed to only complete a few “major” fields (attributes) like ID#, Title, Description, and Image, you are doing yourself a disservice by not completing all of the available fields.  The reason for this recommendation is simple; the more attributes your product has, the easier the search engines can classify your product.

A perfect example is the Google Base program.  It is an excellent way for online retailers to gain greater exposure for their products in Google’s shopping section, but its effectiveness is directly related to your product attributes.  The more attributes you can apply to a product the easier it will be for Google to classify your product, thus enhancing your chance for visibility.  The required attributes for the Google Base program are:

• Condition (new, used, refurbished)
• Description (describes the product)
• ID (must be unique to each item)
• Link (link to the page where the item is sold on your site)
• Price (selling price on your site)
• Title (name of the product)

Most companies complete these fields within their e-commerce platform because they are required for their internal system.  So, even the most basic retailers can use Google Base if they do the minimum required.  But let’s be realistic, doing just the minimum will get you just that – minimum results.  If you are looking to make serious advancements in selling product through Google Base, you need to do more than what is required.  You need to stand out from not only your competition, but also with Google’s system of classifying and listing your items.  You accomplish this by applying more attributes to your products to set yourself apart from your competition. 

Think about this the next time you are adding a new product line, or updating your e-commerce platform data.  Fill in all of the blanks, complete all of the fields, and the extra time you put into this can be rewarded by attracting new customers who would not have found you otherwise.