The ultimate objective of any website is to adhere to the principle of ABC (Always be converting). And this requires a well developed Online Marketing Plan with adequately allocated budget, and a geo targeted strategy. However, a well developed marketing plan needs to be continually monitored and the results measured, to ascertain if the plan is really working. Measuring the performance of website marketing helps to identify where the campaign is falling short, and to rectify problems associated with those shortcomings.

Online Marketing is all about conversions. Tracking a campaign's effectiveness is only a small part of the analysis. Care should be taken to measure, how the campaign affects the number of people who reach a defined goal on the website: goal conversion. An analysis helps to track the conversion value and conversion rate of the Online Marketing efforts, and helps identify which efforts are performing best and also helps you weed out non-performing initiatives.

As a Search Engine marketing process, there are continuous changes that need to be made to the website, which may have either positive or negative repercussions. However, if these changes are facilitated without performing proper tracking and testing, it would be difficult to identify the positive efforts as well as the areas for correction.

The most accepted evaluation for the website is the Trend Analysis, which can be used to compute the overall sales and conversion rates. This visual representation would provide a purview of the website performance.

For the analysis to be fruitful, it is necessary to measure the correct parameters, and this involves sufficient introspection, and cannot be done hastily. The subsequent section highlights the approach to identify these factors.

The most common parameter to judge the efficacy of the Online Marketing campaign is to measure the Click-through rates of the monthly traffic. This includes number of visitors, page views, unique visitors, search phrases, and entrance and exit pages as well as the number of sales.

However, the final set of parameters needs to be customized, based on the nature of the website, and the campaign objectives. A good strategy to identify the parameters is to measure key performance indicators (KPIs).

The KPIs should help to measure metrics that accurately indicate success areas of the Online Marketing campaign, and should be aligned with the overall objectives of the website.

1. It must reflect the website's goals.

2. It must be measurable.

3. It must be a key factor for the success of the website.

A KPI should help ascertain, if the Online Marketing efforts helped achieve the common objective of any B2B websites i.e. Lead Generation. Most lead generation sites would have a set of metrics that may be measured, a few of these may be:

• New Account Sign ups.
• Contact Us Form Completions.
• Motivators to the Registration Process.

The other commonly used parameters for Web analysis are:

• Click density analysis intended to segment the different types of users across the website.
• Analysis of the visitors’ primary purpose, to help measure the reason why the visitors come to the   website.
• Understanding the rate of successful task completion.

Another metric to measure could be the goal conversions, which may be further classified as source conversions and medium conversions. Source conversion helps to establish the Search Engines that send most traffic to the website. Medium conversion involves analyzing which Online Marketing initiatives are working best: e-mail, affiliate, search, and so on.

The metrics that are finalized should be comprehensive and represent all the KPI necessary for a meaningful analysis.

It should be remembered that Online Marketing is an ongoing process and requires patience, but at the same time there should be continuous monitoring of the campaign to track the ROI. Measuring only the end result without measuring the success or failures of the processes in between, would result in wasted effort and marketing budget.

At the end of the day, Search Engine Marketing is not about attracting clicks to a website, but to make money. And the analysis of the appropriate metrics helps to understand what happens beyond the website, which should be addressed to help make more money.