Studying metrics is an important part of marketing. If you don’t study the results of your marketing campaign, you have no way of knowing whether or not it was a success or whether you need to change something for the next round. When choosing what you want to measure, you have a lot of choices. You can measure impressions, likes, follows, page views, engagement, and more. You can also measure the money you’re earning from these events.

In the old days of the internet, business owners would count hits. If a website owner had a million hits, it would be considered successful – never mind any other factor. When you look at clicks versus dollars, you start to realize that’s it’s more important to look at which clicks result in dollars being earned than to just simply count the clicks. The behavior of the user is paramount to understanding if your marketing strategy is working.

With modern web analytics tools such as Google Analytics, you can sift through a variety of metrics and generate a pretty reliable group of charts and reports that will help you determine the behavior of the average visitor to your website.

First, you must have created a goal. What do you what the average user to do? What is your desired outcome? You need to be very specific in your goal setting in order to use analytics to determine success or failure. As you monitor and measure and act on the analysis, tweaking something here and there to improve results, you’ll start to have the outcomes that you want.

Every online action you take such as sending out an email blast, creating a sales page, writing a blog post, guest blogging, etc. all need to start with a goal in mind. Think about this – you can have 100,000 clicks, but if you don’t make any money is it still a success? If you aren’t clear in your goals, that could happen. You could end up with lots of clicks but no money.

A good example is a viral video. A viral video has a great opportunity to create sales – if it’s done right and if the people viewing it understand what company is responsible for the viral video. However, so often that’s not the case. The video goes viral, but no money is made because no one understands the call to action, or who is responsible for the video.

Once you have a goal, and ensure that you have a clear call to action, you can begin measuring results and dollars earned via those actions. You can measure many things about an email blast, for instance. But the most important thing to measure is conversions. How many people and who opened it, clicked through and spent money? Why did they spend the money? Did you include a coupon?

By continually monitoring the reaction of your audience through various marketing campaigns, you will start to get a feel for what moves your audience to convert clicks to sales. While clicks are important (without clicks you won’t have sales), the most important metric to study of all is conversion rates.

If you’re running a campaign that is getting a lot of clicks and no conversions, then you can look at other factors and tweak your sales page to see if you can finally get conversions. So, the answer to the question of clicks or dollars? Dollars win every single time.