TommyCarey
Level X3
Write the reason you're deleting this FAQ
Everyone talks about how they measure their ROI from marketing campaigns and advertising sections, but they never really talk about invisible ROI, which is essentially the sales that are indirectly getting to your website. You can always track who comes to your website, makes a purchase, then gets added to your ROI statistics. You can't always track sales when they are coming directly to your website, because your traffic stats say "Direct", which means the person came right to your website without coming through an ad or banner on a 3rd party website.
In this discussion, I'll be going over your invisible ROI and the ways that you're making money without even know it, and those ways are:
A social presence carries a lot of ROI
When you're working on social media to bring in traffic, you can never really get a specific number on how many sales you're generating through those platforms. This happens because you get traffic from people who are just sharing your plain URL and not hyperlinking it, which gets shown up as "Direct" traffic, and you can't really figure out where that originated.
People always want to talk with their friends and family about things they love, and that might just be your website, but not everyone knows to hyperlink your website in order to directly click it when using email or other chat systems. Usually, the platform your customers are on will convert a domain.com into a link, but it doesn't always happen.
Social media is great for generating leads, but it's not always the easiest way to track random sales that are coming from it, but I guess you could always use a pixel and hope they don't delete cookies 
Word of mouth recommendations
Just like the social media leads that are difficult to track when someone shares a basic URL, word of mouth sales are impossible to track because the person will come directly to your website 9 out of 10 times. The 1 time they will come from a 3rd party website that left a positive review about you, but they were verbally recommended by a friend to check you out, so it's still difficult to track.
You can always put up a form and ask them to say how they heard about you, and most of the people will fill it out when purchasing, so that's one way around this
PPC and Banner Ads
When you're running a PPC or banner ad in order to generate sales, you'll likely use a UTM in order to track the ads people are coming through or the banners they are clicking on. A UTM is essentially a URL that shows you specific things about the links or banners that were clicked, so you'll be able to see the exact page or link the person is coming through.
One downside of this is if your person isn't registering on your website as soon as they click through the links with the UTM, you won't always be able to capture the link or page that sent them. If someone were to delete their cookies, like I mentioned earlier, you won't really know where they're coming from after they visited your page the first time and then decided to type your domain directly into the address bar.
In conclusion
Invisible ROI is an actual thing and I don't see many people talking about it. People always talk about getting random sales after starting a PPC campaign or social media marketing campaign and it's usually from a person that has clicked through to their website, didn't immediately purchase, cleared their cookies/cache, and now they're back after typing your website directly into the address bar. When they make a sale, you will just see them as a direct visitor, and you won't know any different. I see this mostly through social media PPC campaigns, especially on Facebook. I'll run campaigns with UTM links and my sales will get boosted but the majority of the purchases are direct and not from Facebook To counter this I will monitor what I'm making now, then watch my profits after the campaigns are running, and I will be able to estimate my invisible ROI after that
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Thanks!
Tommy Carey