The Secret Methods of Tracking Your Advertising
When you are placing ads in ezines or posting to newsgroups or
leaving your sig file anywhere, you should be tracking the
effectiveness of your efforts. People have been tracking their
advertising efforts since the beginning of direct marketing. If
you are a fan of the tv infomercials, you would have noticed
that when the payment information is displayed, it always
includes a particular Department number or instructs you to call
a particular extension number. This tells the advertiser where
their customers and prospects are coming from. You can easily
implement these tricks yourself so that you can determine what
the most cost effective methods of advertising are for you.
Here is a simple and free way to track your ads. Lets say you
are running 3 ads for the same product and placing those ads in
3 different ezines. The product is sold from one page on your
website called: http://www.yourdomain.com/sales.html
If you had every ad point to that URL, you would never know
which ad worked or which ezine brought in the sales. Therefore,
you could track your ads by doing this:
Place a question mark and some code at the end of each URL. For
example:
sales?ezine1 sales?ezine2 sales?ezine3
You can make the code whatever you want as long as you remember
which code you chose for the particular ad. Just remember this
does not only apply to ezine advertising, you could use this in
your discussion forum posts or in your sig file or anywhere else
that you choose to promote your site, both online and offline. I
suggest keeping a record of which code matches which ad as it
can be quite confusing keeping track of all your ads. For
example, I use Microsoft Excel to keep a spreadsheet record of
all of my advertising efforts.
Your webserver will not recognize the question mark (?) code but
your server logs will. This is the key. People will all end up
on the same page (sales.html) but your logs will indicate the
sales that came from each unique ad. This will allow you to make
an informed decision about which ezines to continue to place ads
in and those that aren't worth your investment of time and money.
Your server logs record every URL that was entered (or clicked
on) to get to your site. Whenever people order, you can go to
your server logs and match the time they ordered to the time
that hits to your sales page were received using the unique
code. This will help you to determine which ad brought in the
sale.
If you do not have access to your server logs or you do not know
how to use them, there are many free and inexpensive stat
tracking solutions available on the internet that are easy to
understand and implement. Here is one that we highly recommend
using: Sitegauge
How will you determine which ads were effective? In the offline
world, advertising is measured in response rate. This means how
many people responded to your ad (responded could mean
clickthrus, sales or even subscribers to your ezine). You have
to decide which of the possible responses is valuable to you.
Are you trying to get more traffic, more sales or simply capture
email addresses so you can follow up at a later date?
Since we are talking about sales in this article, you have to
determine how many visitors it takes before you get a sale. If
an ad brought in 100 visitors and you had 4 sales, then you have
a 25% response rate. That is quite amazing. You would then want
to keep running the ad in the ezine that brought you that
response rate until you see the rate start to drop dramatically.
What you have just learned is the key to cost effective
advertising. Advertising, when performed efficiently is like an
exact science instead of a guessing game. This is scientific
advertising at it's best!
P.S. An even simpler (albeit not free) way of tracking ads is to
purchase affiliate software and use it to track your ads by
manually assigning each ad a unique affiliate id. This is very
simple to do and can be set up quite easily.