Working in research and development for a large infomercial company, I had many opportunities to do large advertising campaigns with lots of different online advertising agencies and Internet marketing companies. I would literally go online for days researching companies and the types of advertising they offered to find just the right ones to meet the needs of our company.
We spent thousands of dollars before we were able to come up with accurate measures of which campaigns were actually converting prospects into customers. But after much testing, I came to an interesting conclusion about online advertising.
Many advertisers have a large emphasis on the amount of exposure you get to your web site, but after running many expensive campaigns, I have learned that this is not what matters at all. The things that matters most in web marketing usually boil down to how many qualified, targeted click thrus you can generate to your site.
Click thrus are the main thing you need to focus on when creating an advertising campaign. For our company, it has been the most accurate measure of the quality of any type of advertising we bought, whether it was banner ads, email campaigns, popunders, search engine, pay per click or any other type of advertising you do on the web.
Click thrus represent an Internet user who has been motivated to visit your site by clicking on an email or online advertisement of any type. It is the highest quality traffic you can have coming to your site.
Once you get this type of high quality traffic to your site, you can then focus on trying to convert your visitors to customers and sales. If you have a tracking method or software, you can then determine your conversion ratio. The conversion ration will tell you how many visitors you will need to get to your site to convert a sale.
If you can figure out how many click thrus it takes to make a sale and you know now much it cost to get clicks to your web site, you can then use that information to predict the results of some of your advertising campaigns. Armed with this information, you will then have a lot more confidence when spending money or time on any type of online advertising.
If you are looking to generate high quality click thru's to your web site, you will find that this is not the easiest thing to do. You will find many types of online advertising and lots of companies making outrageous claims on how much exposure you get. But when it comes down to it, exposure means nothing if you don