With the Reserve Bank reducing interest rates by another 50 basis points in South Africa this week, it seems that the country is officially out of its financial slump. While this may free up a bit of extra cash for consumers, and will hopefully boost spending and consumer confidence, lessons have undoubtedly been learnt during the lean times we experienced during 2009.

Consumers were far more cautious about their spending with most household tightening their belts and restricting themselves to the basic essentials. Businesses too learnt how to make do with less and many slashed marketing and advertising budgets and instead shifted their focus onto client retention and adding value to services.

Now that the worst is over it doesn’t mean that it’s time to return to wasteful spending. On the contrary, perhaps the best lesson for businesses from these tough economic times was that it’s so important to make every marketing cent count. Central to this is measuring exactly what’s working and what isn’t – this is the way to squeeze the most value out of marketing spend.

Online marketing is not only far more cost-effective than traditional channels, but it also enjoys far greater penetration, more accurate targeting and it is completely measurable. Analytics allows you to determine where exactly your visitors are coming from, what they’re doing and how they’re doing it on your site.

This goes hand in hand with website usability. It’s possible to fine tune your web analytics to focus on measuring which activities lead to sales or conversions. This allows you to concentrate on what’s important to your bottom line. Also, you’ll be able to gather information that will allow you to make intelligent choices about design and structural changes to improve the usability and effectiveness of your website as a marketing tool. To see if users are clicking on specific text, such as adobe promotion code, you can ask your software to track clicks.

With web analytics, it’s possible to analyse what content is most engaging to customers. Google Analytics is a free enterprise-grade analytics solution which includes fantastic advanced features like user segmentation, custom reporting, benchmarking and e-commerce tracking. Google Analytics’ easy customisation means you can quickly create dashboards, reports and visualisations that matter to you.

Website conversion analytics is really what brings all your eMarketing efforts together. It’s where you’ll see your results and, with proper interpretation of the metrics and by looking at trends, you’ll be able to optimise your digital marketing strategies to ensure you get the most out of your online marketing spend.

About the Author:
AlterSage, a full service online marketing agency, offers tailored online marketing solutions that achieve targeted exposure for your website. Goal focussed and driven by return on investment, services include search engine optimisation, pay per click advertising, web design and development, persuasive web copywriting, brand building, conversion analysis and many more.