Some online retailers have marketing campaigns that run on autopilot all year. Surely, you don’t count yourself in that group (nudge, nudge).

If you aren’t tuning and tweaking for key seasonal holidays, your campaigns are likely underperforming. As we head into the holiday shopping season, which is just moments away, it is a good time to assess your big three of SEM: Search Engine Optimization, Pay-Per-Click, and Comparison Shopping Engines. Do you have your titles, descriptions, and ads tweaked to give you maximum exposure?

For an overview of our recommendations, please head over to our HEROweb Marketing & Design article archive and take a look at Q4 SEM (Search Engine Marketing) Pointers.

You’ve made the decision to jump (or at least dip a toe) into the waters of Search Marketing, either through Pay-Per-Click (PPC) or a comparison shopping engine (CSE) program.  You have your keyword list ready and feed sent off to your shopping engine of choice.  The campaigns launch and your products are now in front of millions!

Once the orders start coming in and revenue is being generated, the question now is, how do I know if this thing is working for me on a financial level?

The answer is that you should have an idea on this even before the first visitor hits the site.

One of the great aspects of advertising online through either PPC or a CSE, is the ability to accurately track performance.  So before devoting time and money to an online campaign, one should make a decision on the specific goals of the endeavor.  While all businesses have different P&L (profit and loss) models, overhead costs, etc., the one metric most all have an interest in ultimately,  is Return.

This metric can be looked at in a few different ways, most often through either Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) or Return on Investment (ROI) calculations.

ROAS can be measured simply as Total Revenue divided by Total Ad Cost.

In this scenario, if you spent $100 on an AdWords or CSE campaign and made $500 in revenue, your ROAS is $5 (or 5x).

ROI can be measured in much the same way, with a few new variables added to the equation.

On the Revenue side, one would likely subtract Tax and Shipping income, while on the Ad Cost side, items such as profit margin and management fee (when using an agency to manage the campaign) can be taken into account.  ROI then, is typically a better indicator of the true profitability of an online campaign.

The image below provides a good estimate, based on product-level margin, what type of ROAS one would need to see for profit at an ROI level.

Either way you slice it, the Return metric is one that every advertiser should consider before marketing online and once out there, calculate correctly to  effectively assess campaign performance.