Must-Have Information to Set Web Marketing Benchmarks for Success

Before we embark on any new web marketing campaign for a client, we try to establish some benchmarks. We ask the client to provide some baseline information that will help us measure improvements and providing proper attribution going forward.

The questions below help establish benchmarks for sales, traffic and conversion improvements as the campaign moves forward.

1. Please provide the (approximate) average numbers for the following as it relates to your monthly website traffic:
   • Page Views
   • Unique Visitors
   • Returning Visitors
   • Total Visitors
   • Hits
   • Other (specify)
2. Do you have any peak months or seasons? If so, please tell us what they are.
3. If yes above, please provide your highest and lowest number of visitors over the past twelve months and notate the month of occurrence.
4. How much do you spend on advertising each year outside of search engine optimization?
   • TV
   • Radio
   • PPC
   • Billboards
   • Magazines
   • Misc. Internet
5. Of the above, which do you feel provides the best ROI (Return on Investment)?
6. Are you performing any kind of tracking specific to each of the investments above for true ROI? If so, please explain details and methods of ROI tracking.
7. How many orders did you average per month over the last 12 months?
8. What were your highest/lowest number of orders within the past 12 months?
9. What was your average order amount over the past 12 months?
10. What was your highest/lowest order amount within the past 12 months?
11. What was your average monthly revenue over the past 12 months?
12. What was your highest/lowest monthly revenue over the past 12 months?

Most of this information typically won’t be found in Analytics, but it provides good measurements nonetheless. Integrating this information into our ongoing data analysis provides us with feedback that better helps us understand what, where and why changes in the data are occurring, which gives us a truer picture of what is or isn’t working as the campaign progresses.