In economics, when talking about any investment, we often hear ‘ROI‘ mentioned: nothing particularly complicated nor mysterious, let’s specify it right away.
This is a principle that underlies the behavior of anyone who invests money in a business hoping to create something profitable. The term Roi comes from Anglo-Saxon parlance and stands for “Returnon Investment”: which in Italian can be translated as “return on ‘investment,” or a parameter indicating the return on investment.
To give a practical example, if I invest 1000 euros in something and months later that something is worth 1500 euros, my Roi will be 50%. All in all, a good percentage.
Let’s imagine that we need to transpose this to a field of
marketing for the web
: again, Roi will be a useful parameter to understand what kind of investment we want to support and how much we think this will have margins for a future return. The first thing we need to do accordingly is to establish the budget we think we need and want to allocate; then figure out what the expected, or at least hoped-for, benefits might be. And this is where the differences of Roi in web marketing versus classical marketing come into play.
ROI and benefits of the web
With reference to what has been said so far, it is easy to understand how in marketing terms the Web has significant advantages over the world of traditional media: or at least how there are wider potentials that, if exploited properly, can lead to satisfactory results.
As a starting assumption, the Web definitely has a larger, potentially infinite user base: of course, this can be a plus as well as a minus. We must always have in mind what our target audience is and avoid detaching ourselves too much from it in order to avoid wasting money and time.
With this rule firmly in mind, we can take advantage of what is the benefit of a large catchment area such as that offered by the network. Once we have focused on our target audience, we can, in the next steps, figure out with certainty which potential customers are actually interested in what we are proposing. Web marketing allows us to accomplish this with a fair amount of data grounding.
Take for example the Adwords PPC campaigns that are so popular on the Web; with proper campaign tracking we can collect various information about the clicks obtained by going step by step to monitor the traffic generated and thus obtain the estimated Roi. Same goes for banner campaigns: by monitoring the performance of these we can get a detailed picture of whether we are investing our money well or whether something should be changed.
Tips for improving ROI in PPC
Having come to this point, it is good to specify that there are no certain procedures for predicting Roi even in the world of the Web because we cannot know with absolute certainty the performance of our future campaigns: however, one can try to
optimize our efforts
reducing the margin of error as much as possible.
Among the stakes to be followed is undoubtedly to create good ads that are as web-friendly as possible: for this reason, at least a good knowledge of the Internet tool is the basis of any marketing campaign. The ads created must be as optimized as possible for the target industry and attractive, otherwise they will not receive feedback thus going on to generate poor conversions. And, as obvious, going to negatively affect Roi as well.
A good understanding of the dynamics of the web and the tools used on the web allows us to monitor our campaigns and understand whether they are going in the right direction. As well as analyzing our target market to glean what is deemed most functional for our goal.
