What Drives Online Sales?

Rose Publishing saw a major increase in its online business in the first half of 2009. What fueled these online sales and how do we know?
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We track every online sale we receive. Without giving away any details, these are the top four sources for online sales ranked in order of effectiveness based on our experience.

  1. eMail marketing
  2. Printed catalogs
  3. Google AdWords/Organic
  4. Bing, Yahoo, MSN, and all other search engines combined.

All other categories combined (radio, banner ads, referrals, cost per click, social media, etc.) make up less than 10% of our online revenue. We’ve decided not to spend much time or money here anymore.
What about you? How can you know where your sales are coming from?
By tracking every click, lead, and sale. You simply put a link to your website in a tweet, blog post, or Facebook, and build in a tracking code so that you can track the number of times people click on your link and buy something or sign up for something. These tracking codes are easy to add by using the free Google URL Builder. Then you can track the visits from that source by using the free service called Google Analytics. If you put the tracking code into the shopping cart, you can see actual dollars spent and products purchased as a result of a visit from that source.
Where do most of your online sales come from? How do you know?

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