If you want more traffic to your website, you may be ready to invest in increasing online visitors.  Try not to grow visitors for the sake of growth, but rather to grow a dedicated audience that supports your brand and your business goals.  

There isn’t a magic number of visitors needed for a successful business, but to measure digital health, it is good to monitor year over year metrics.  Generally, you want your online visitors to grow year over year. Tools like Google Analytics make it easy to measure this.

It’s also important to understand what percentage of visitors convert to an action on your site.  If you are an interior designer, for example, and have a lead form on your site for a free consultation, it is good to know how many visitors need to come to your site before one completes the online form.

Investment:

When starting digital advertising, start slow and measure the traffic and conversion rates per source.  Here are the general costs per session (what it costs to have someone view a page on your site). The costs listed below in the graph industry-specific based on real-world campaigns, though some may vary based on keywords, target audience, and geography.  It's important to know that something like Facebook might be $.13 per session, while something like Google Adwords will be closer to $1.00.

Return:

To figure out the return on this investment, you’ll need to start investing in the marketing vehicle that makes the most sense for you to start calculating what percentage converts to a lead and what percentage of those leads convert to a customer.  Let’s look at an example:

Interior Design Website Luxury Designs

Luxury Designs is an interior design shop in Boise, Idaho.  They have two places on their site for visitors to take action: one is a lead form for a free consultation and the other is a phone number.  They would like their website to drive more phone calls and consultation requests.

Luxury Designs has a budget of $500 / month to spend in generating more online leads.  The owners decide to Spend $250 on Instagram, $99 on a Dering Hall membership and $150 on Google Adwords.  

From this investment, they will increase their monthly sessions by 722.  This is the breakdown:

• Instagram: 333
• Dering Hall: 254
• Google Adwords: 135

If 5% turn into a phone call and 7.5% turn into a free consultation inquiry this design shop will get 90 more leads this month than they got last month.  

This firm will have to figure out how many calls and inquiries they need to field before one turns into a project.  At that point, they will have a better sense of their cost per acquisition and where they should increase their investments.   

How to Choose the Right Marketing Vehicle:

The marketing tactics above are some of the main drivers of digital traffic.  

Facebook is often the most cost-efficient, with the ability to micro-target by interest, household income, propensity to hire professionals, love of design, and more.  Facebook is great for those wanting to start in digital on a budget.

Dering Hall is the next most cost-efficient, and also has an audience of highly affluent design enthusiasts and professionals.  Dering Hall is great for not only driving website visitors but increasing brand awareness through their syndication network that includes both regional and national publications.

Pinterest is great for brands and makers.  Pinterest drives more shopping behavior than any other social media platform and has a highly visual format.

Instagram is another great option for a more visual, aesthetic online experience, but the cost per session is more expensive.  This cost increase is mostly because the general behavior of Instagram users is to look, but not necessarily to take action on the site.

Google Adwords is often the most expensive option, especially for designers and broad categories like furniture brands.  Google Adwords requires constant monitoring and a dedicated keyword strategy to produce results. While everyone would like to appear higher in search, Google Adwords is a challenging course, especially for those with a limited budget.

Once you are ready to invest in digital marketing, make sure you measure that traffic and those conversions so you can see where the best drivers are coming from.