I hate to beat a dead horse - but I am still surprised at how many companies do not measure their online marketing efforts. This post is aimed at the basics of ROI measurement for web and online marketing campaigns.

Working in the online marketing space targeting small - mid size firms, I hear alot of marketing depts saying we have a website b/c it's important for our customers to access our information, but then they don't really know how their customers are using their website.

• Where are your customers going?
• Which pages are most valuable?
• How are users interacting with your site (sequence, contact forms, purchase behavior, etc.)?
• How many people can't find the information they are looking for and quickly bail out of the site?

In the Oct 20, 2008 issue of Ad Age, it was announced that YouTube is now the second largest search site at 2.6 billion searches in August (they overtook Yahoo at 2.4 billion searches). Although this doesn't come close to Google's dominance of the search category (7.6 billion), it does raise some interesting questions about the value of niche search sites.  When people are searching strictly for videos - they are turning to youtube.com to get their info. Most of these searches are regarding entertainment; and the gaming and movie industries are buying up ad space featured under "promotional videos". But I also found some interesting microsites for companies you wouldn't necessarily expect including: Bank of America (http://www.youtube.com/yourmoney) and University of Phoenix (http://www.youtube.com/UofPhoenix?feature=pyv). Lessons learned: YouTube is definitely a player in the search space. In addition to Facebook applications, your PPC campaign, blogs and other social media - consider not only posting your videos/ads on youtube.com but also creating content driven microsites for your paid ad listings to engage users with your product.  Afterall, 2.6 billion people are searching every month...