11.7 Measuring Viral Effect and performance

As with any marketing campaign, tracking the results and optimizing performance over time is absolutely necessary. Understanding how viral and effective your marketing campaign is crucial information, not to mention interesting.  You may be reaching a huge audience with your viral campaigns but the key is to analyze how many of these actually visit your site.  You may have the right viral marketing strategy but somehow your message may not be efficient enough to bring back visitors to your website.  Fixing it could increase your sales by 200%.  This is just an example; there are many reasons why you want a detailed analysis of the viral effect and performance of your campaigns. 

Thankfully, sophisticated viral marketers can track insightful and actionable data that can be used to evaluate performance. Important metrics to analyze are pass-along, click-through, and conversion rates. Marketers should separate the click-through and conversion rates by original customers from referrals and evaluate their respective performances. These metrics will alert a marketer about the offers and customers that drive the highest ROI.

In the next chapter, we'll discuss hot software products.